#there’s plenty of obvious straightforward evidence of things. it’s not necessary

[taylorrepdetective]

People drive me crazy. Ya’ll as bad as maga folks sometimes

[togglesbloggle]

So, @argumate is up to some more prosocial atheistic trolling.  As is usual with such things, the conversation isn’t particularly elevated, but it does make me nostalgic for the old bbc days.  So I thought I’d be the Discourse I’d like to see in the world.  This is the post that kicked things off; correctly noting Platonism as a philosophical foundation underpinning most versions of Abrahamic faiths.  And it’s probably the most useful place for me to target also, since hardly anybody just identifies as a Platonist but most westerners are one.  So, without further ado, a halfhearted and full-length defense of Platonism:

Well, strike that.  A little bit of ado.

I’m not a Platonist myself, so this is a devil’s advocate type of thing.  Or maybe you could call it an intellectual Turing test?  As I discuss here, my philosophical commitments are mostly to skepticism, and for instrumental reasons, to reductionist materialism.  That combo leaves me some wiggle room, and I find it fairly easy to provisionally occupy a religious mindset, so I can generally read and enjoy religious polemics.  I also have a fairly deep roster of what are often called ‘spiritual experiences’; I’m probably in the set of people that are by nature predisposed to religion.  I am not religious, and I approve of Argumate saying things like ‘God is not real’ a lot.  This is in no way a retread of the arguments in The Republic or Plato’s other writings; you can go read those if you want, but I’m going to play around with stuff that I think is better suited to this audience.

Attention conservation notice: yikes.  This got pretty long.

Anyway, on to the argument.  Argumate’s main point is pretty clear, I think: ‘forms’ in the Greek sense are a function and product of the perceiving mind.  Birds don’t conform to bird-ness; instead brains naturally produce a sort of bird-ness category to make processing the world easier, and to turn a series of wiggly and continuous phenomena into a discrete number of well-modeled objects.  Basically, we impose ‘thing-ness’ on the wavefunction of reality.  And there are some good reasons to think that it might be true!  Our understanding of categories gets a lot sharper when reality conveniently segregates itself, and whenever that boundary gets a little blurry, our ability to use categories tends to break down.  If the recognition of animal-ness came from contact with a higher plane of reality, you wouldn’t necessarily expect people to get confused about sponges.

But.  While there’s certainly plenty of support for Argumate’s position, it doesn’t strike me as anything near self-evident, or necessarily true.  So what I’ll argue is that Platonism isn’t obviously false, and that if we ever converge on a true answer to the question of our reality, then that truth could plausibly be recognizably Platonist.  My opening salvo here is, predictably enough, mathematics.

‘Mathematical Platonism’ is a whole other thing, only distantly related to Classical Platonism, and I only really mean to talk about the latter.  But nonetheless, mathematics really actually does appear to be a situation where we can simply sit in a chair, think deeply, and then more or less directly perceive truths.  Basic arithmetic can be independently discovered, and usefully applied, by almost anybody; ‘quantity’ comes naturally to most humans, and the inviolable laws of quantity are exploited just as often.  It’s also very hard to argue that these are ‘mere’ linguistic conventions, since fundamental natural behaviors like the conservation of mass depend on a kind of consistent logical framework.  In most chemical reactions, the number of atomic nuclei does not change, and the atoms added to a new molecule are perfectly mirrored by the loss of atoms in some reactant; this remains true in times and places where no thinking mind exists to count them.

There are a lot of debates about what math is, fundamentally.  But inevitably when we study math, we’re studying the set of things that must be true, given some premise: we’re asking whether some proposition is a necessary consequence of our axioms.  The so-called ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ suggests that the phenomena that Argumate mentions- hotdogs and birds and whatnot- are observed only within the auspices of a sort of super-phenomenon.  Loosely speaking, we can call this super-phenomenon self-consistency.  

We treat phenomena as having a natural cause.  Platonism, at its crunchy intellectually rewarding center, represents a willingness to bite the bullet and say that self-consistency also has a cause.  Plato himself actually provided what might be the most elegant possible answer!  Basically, posit the simplest thing that meets the criterion of being A) autocausal and B) omnicausal, and then allow the self-consistency of the cosmos to follow from its dependence on (in Platonist terms, its emanation from) that single, unitary cause.  The universe is self-consistent for the very straightforward reason that there’s only one thing.  Any plurality, to the extent that plurality is even a thing, happens because ‘the only real thing’ is only partially expressed in a particular phenomenon.  To skip ahead to Lewis’ Christian interpretation of all this, you’d say that humans and moons and hotdogs are distinguished from God not by what they have, but by what they lack.

And for present purposes, I do want to take a step back and point out that this does feel like a reasonable answer to a very important question.  Materialism fundamentally has no answer to the question of self-consistency and/or the presence of logic and order, and that is (for me) one of its least satisfying limits.  We’ve got things like ‘the origin of the universe’, sure.  But we probe the Big Bang with mathematical models!  That’s a hell of an assumption- namely, that even at the origin of our universe, self-consistency applies.  It’s not like materialism has a bad explanation.  It just remains silent, treats the problem as outside the domain.  If we’re adopting the thing for utilitarian reasons, that’s fine.  But if we’re treating materialism as a more comprehensive philosophy, a possible approach to the bigger questions, then it’s a painful absence.  In that domain, far from being self-evidently true (in comparison to Platonism), materialism doesn’t even toss its hat in the ring!

Which, uh, gets us to the stuff about Forms and shadows in Plato’s Cave and all that- the intermediate form of existence between the omnisimple core of Platonism and the often chaotic and very plural experience of day-to-day life.  And frankly, we’re not especially bound to say that the forms are exactly as Plato described them, any more than atomism is restricted to Democritus.  Whether there is some ‘bird-ness’ that is supra- to all extant birds might be contestable; however, it’s easier to wonder whether ‘binary tree’ is supra- to speciation and the real pattern of differences between organisms that we map using Linnaean taxonomy.

But, this is an attempted defense of Platonism and not Toggle’s Version of Platonism that He Invented Because it’s Easier, so I’ll give it a try.  Fair warning to the reader, what follows is not fully endorsed (even in the context of a devil’s advocate-type essay), except the broader claim that it’s not self-evidently false.  And on the givens we came up with a couple paragraphs ago, this is a reasonable way to tackle what necessarily follows.  So let me see how far I can defend a very strong claim: in a self-consistent (or: mathematical) cosmos, beauty cannot be arbitrary.

Remember that Plato never argued that his Forms were arbitrary, or even fully discrete as such; their apparent plurality, like our own, emanates from the unitary Thing What Exists.  And so, bird-ness is treated as a contingent thing, not an absolute.  It’s just not contingent on human experience.  And so for us to believe in ‘bird-ness’ is to believe that there exists some specific and necessary pattern- a Form- which any given material bird must express.

Let’s take an obvious example: any flying bird will, for fairly simple aerodynamic reasons, tend to be symmetrical.  Usually, this means two wings.  In theory, you could… have one in the middle?  Maybe?  Even that seems rather goofy to try to imagine, but you could probably get away with it if you were extremely creative biologically.  And if we see a bird with only one wing (without a prosthetic or other form of accommodation), then we will tend quite naturally to recognize that something awful is in the process of happening.

A fully materialist explanation of our reaction here would say: we think of the one-winged bird as problematic because A) we have been socialized to recognize and appreciate two-winged birds, and spurn deviations from that socialization, or maybe B) because natural selection has given us a set of instincts that recognize when a body plan has failed in the past, so things like ‘being crippled’ or ‘being sick’ are recognizable.  

Platonism, I think, would offer a third option, that C) we recognize (as emanations of The Real Thing) that a one-winged bird body is insufficiently reflective of The Real Thing, and that accordingly it lacks the ability to keep existing.  Plato had some… basically magical ideas, about how Forms are recognized, but here I’ll point out that ‘deduction’ is a completely serviceable kind of magic for our purposes.  It is, after all, our direct experience of the self-consistency of the cosmos, which follows from the fact that we are ourselves an expression of that same self-consistency; it meets the criteria.  

Materialists, obviously, would agree that deductive reasoning could allow a person to recognize the problems inherent in a one-winged bird, but as I said a few paragraphs up, their(/our) explanation of this process is rootless.  “Yes, logic and a few high-confidence assumptions let you assume that a bird with only one wing is in trouble,” they might say.  And we might ask- “what makes you so sure?”  And then the materialist must respond, “Well, let me be more clear.  It always worked in the past, and my Bayesian priors are strongly in the direction of the method continuing to bear fruit.”  True enough, but it’s not an explanation and doesn’t pretend to be.  The universe just does this weird thing for some reason; it works ‘by magic’.  So why not call it that?  Theurgy for all!

So, consider.  We recognize (deductively, let’s say for the sake of argument) that a one-winged bird is on the road to becoming nonexistent, absent some change in circumstances.  It may keep going for a little while, but it’s not in homeostasis.  And if we reasonably admit this very basic duality to our thinking- things which can persist, and things which cannot- then we start to recognize a sort of analogy between physical phenomena and mathematical propositions.  A lemma can be right or wrong, albeit sometimes unprovably so.  Basically, it can follow- or not- from the axioms we’re working with.  And in a softer but very real sense, that one-winged body plan is wrong analogously to the lemma’s wrongness.  Not ‘wrong’ as in ‘counter to cultural norms’, but ‘wrong’ as in ‘unstable given the premises, given the Thing That Exists Most’.  Look up research on fitness landscapes, if you’re so inclined- actual biological research isn’t totally unacquainted with the notion.  There exists a surprisingly discrete ideal or set of ideals, both for flying birds as a whole and subordinately for any given flying bird species.  And we have discovered this using magic.

Insofar as beauty is something to be admired, or pursued, or is otherwise desirable, then our sense of beauty must necessarily correlate with those abstract, and dare I say supra-real, qualities which allow things to persist, and which can therefore be understood deductively.  And that set of qualities does, effectively, meet the Platonic criterion of a ‘form’.

The immediate materialist objection is: hey, wait a minute.  The supposed ‘objective’ criterion of a bird is contingent, not absolute!  It follows from the strength of gravity, the thickness of the atmosphere, the availability of food sources, and on and on.  This is one of the most important reasons why genetic drift and speciation happens in the first place, because the ‘ideal’ bird depends on an environment that’s in constant flux.

True enough.  But!  How do you think the atmosphere got there?  It’s an old trick in religious discourse, but in this case I think a valid one.  The rightness of the bird depends on the atmosphere, the rightness of the atmosphere depends on the planet, the rightness of the planet depends on the solar system, and ultimately it all depends on that necessary self-consistency which (we proclaim) implies our unitary Most Real Thing.  This does mean that we can’t really think of Platonic forms as wholly discrete objects, unconnected to one another and without internal relation among themselves- unfortunately, that’s part of the original Plato that I don’t see as defensible, even with maximum charity.  But there’s such a thing as a ‘ring species’, and if we admit Platonic Forms of that type, a kind of dense network of paths being traced through higher-dimensional spaces that correspond to the shadow of That Than Which There Is No Whicher, then it’s more than salvageable.  It’s both satisfying to imagine and, I think, quite consistent with the spirit of the original philosophy.

One thing this doesn’t mean.  Even if we were to accept all of this, we aren’t obliged to resign ourselves to the lot of that one-winged bird.  Indeed, if anything this gives us a rich language by which to justify a prosthetic wing or other form of accommodation: we can talk about ‘making the bird whole’, and can see how our compassion for that bird might lead us to create the conditions of homeostasis once again.  But it does mean that if we take a position on the merits of existence- if we’re in favor- then we don’t treat a one- and two-winged bird as coequal scenarios.

Anyway, this has gone on hideously long already for what’s basically an intellectual exercise, so I won’t dive into immortal souls or any of the other ancillaries.  I mostly want to reiterate that, far from being obviously false, I do think that (some forms of) Platonism are quite defensible, and can provide coherent answers to questions that I A) care about very deeply and B) can’t resolve to my own satisfaction.  Of course, it is not obviously nor trivially true, either.  But one can be Platonist without being willfully wrong.

[lordeasriel]

lord asriel’s quick analysis

Or why redemption isn’t always necessary.

Given that some people asked me to finish it and that I want to finish it, here’s my stroke over Lord Asriel’s arc. This is based on a post someone made it on reddit about the lack of redeeming traits on his part and this is my personal take on Asriel, so ok, here we go:

Let me get this out of the way: the thing about Lord Asriel is that he is not a redeemable character; that is not his purpose nor his story. He never seeks redemption, nor he sees his actions as a product of villainy or evil; in fact, Asriel believes he is quite righteous and he is willing to do whatever the fuck it takes to achieve his goals.

We never get a direct understanding of his motives: he does say he fights for freedom, he states his disgust with the Magisterium and the Kingdom of Heaven, and those who surround him believe in his cause and say, constantly, that his side is the right side, and that he fights for freedom and against the tyranny of the Church.

What is contantly overlooked is the fact Lord Asriel doesn’t require a redemption, this isn’t some sort of requirement a character needs every time they screw up. This, well, aversion to Asriel and the need to have him either punished or redeemed is solely based on the fact he killed Roger in cold blood, sort of, to wage his war for freedom. Was that fucked up? Absolutely! Does this means he requires redemption over that? No, and Philip Pullman himself explains why when Mary Malone says:

“I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.” (The Amber Spyglass)

This has a lot to do with the recurring themes of the books, about morals, ethics and the poor use of free will by some, and it personifies almost every character in the books, from Lyra to Iorek. Everyone has committed some sort of bad deed at some point, but that does not label them as evil, and the same rules apply to Asriel. This is a man who’s crossed the very limits of the multiverse to achieve his goals, by being good in looking after the destruction of the Kingdom, and by being bad while killing Roger (plus being a bad father, a bad uncle, a bad lover, but let us remain philosophical for now).

Asriel is relentless, ruthless and sometimes, even cruel, to Lyra, to Marisa, to anyone really. At Jordan, he walks in, puts the fear of God (unironically lol) into almost everyone, including Lyra and the Master, he takes control of the enviroment and sets on to do what he went to Jordan for: to get money for his plot, so he can tear the sky apart and defy the Kingdom of Heaven. Lyra fears him (righteously) and admires his fierceness, she respects strength and brute force, it is the reason why she is so drawn to violent figures or rude characters, being herself quite rude and arrogant because she mirrors her uncle/dad.

He is considered to be a passionate man by almost everyone, and he causes a great impression in everyone he meets, including the reader. He was written as a likable character at first, made from scratch to fit in the role of the aloof, sometimes austere but caring uncle, or the traveler who serves as the inspiration for the hero (Bilbo Baggins, for quite the literal example, or Professor Kirke in Narnia). Sir Philip describes him, in Northern Lights:

“Then Lord Asriel stood up and turned away from the fire. She saw him fully, and marveled at the contrast he made with the plump Butler, the stooped and languid Scholars. Lord Asriel was a tall man with powerful shoulders, a fierce dark face, and eyes that seemed to flash and glitter with savage laughter. It was a face to be dominated by, or to fight: never a face to patronize or pity. All his movements were large and perfectly balanced, like those of a wild animal, and when he appeared in a room like this, he seemed a wild animal held in a cage too small for it. At the moment his expression was distant and preoccupied.”  (page 13, Knopf edition).

He is, at first, compared to other men in Lyra’s life (the scholars, mostly) only to be extravangantly praised for being nothing like those men. Stelmaria, quiet and reserved, beautiful and pacifying, is the ultimate contrast for Asriel; together, they are one, and he is an aristocrat with wild temper, and she is a snow leopard, a predator, but beautiful and wise. These are the representation of Satan, as in Paradise Lost: forsaken and forgotten by history for fighting the Authority, Asriel and Stelmaria are the embodiment of disobedience and they are bound to rebel again because that is their nature. All that’s left to them is a reason and the Magisterium, oh boy, they’ve given them plenty.

Now, think about a man who’s had everything, then this rising power that was the Magisterium, comes and takes everything from him, from his money to his daughter over something, not trivial, but certainly something that didn’t require such harsh method of punishment; considering a lot of his wealth was confiscated and assuming he had to pay a lot of fees and taxes because of the Court Trial, he was very much not the man he was before Mrs. Coulter’s affair with him. He obeys the rules and stays away from Lyra, only to discover her mother is with the Church and that they intend to harm Lyra, even after he played nice. His friends in Oakley Street are trying to protect Lyra, but against the Magisterium, after witnessing how powerful they are, how far gone they are willing to go, things aren’t looking very bright for Asriel. He even says, in Northern Lights:

“They’re stronger than anyone, Asriel! You don’t know-”

“I don’t know? I? No one in the world knows better than I how strong the Church is! But it isn’t strong enough for this. The Dust will change everything, anyway. There’s no stopping it now.” (page 394, Knopf edition).

The Asriel we meet in La Belle Sauvage is younger and a man who’s just been massacred by the Church, as he reminds us of in Northern Lights; he is wounded after all that has happened, almost in a tender way, as if he had been softened by it. But he still is himself; proud, arrogant and scholarly, he risks Lyra’s safety and his own to indulge himself and be with her for a while, to spite the Magisterium and its distasteful influence. Under the moonlight, he loves her so immensely, in such a raw and fiery way, that for a moment Malcolm even thinks Asriel might leave with her, and so did I.

Everything Asriel does, everything that leads to his war in the name of the Republic of Heaven, has to do with Lyra’s birth and how he lost everything because of the injustice the Magisterium imposed on the world; how he had an affair with a woman he loved and how she could easily have gotten a divorce to prevent all of that; how they took his fortune and prestige because he was defiant. The murders, the oppression, his career as a scholar, his life as a whole, and then after the affair, his daughter’s, all was threatened by the Magisterium. It’s hard to say when he decided to fuck up the sky, but I like to think by the time he left Lyra at Jordan, he was already working on his revenge, because when he lost everything, that was his turning point. He doesn’t do any of this because he is a caring, loving person; he does out of hatred and indignation, two powerful tools that fuel his existence for the next twelve years, perhaps even before then, in small dosages. 

There’s constant evidence of his hatred for the Church and their dogmas, especially on chapter 21 in Northern Lights, when he monologues to Lyra about Dust and how the Church allowed such things as Bolvangar to happen, implying that as many others, including scholars, he knew about what was happening. There could be a number of reasons as to why he didn’t interfer, and the most obvious one is that he was in prison, so there wasn’t much he could in his position. A second, deeper reason, is Mrs. Coulter’s involvement with Bolvangar, and by involvement I mean leadership, basically. He was fully aware she was the one responsible for Bolvangar, even enlightening us:

“That’s why they had to hide away in the far North, in darkness and obscurity. And why the Church was glad to have someone like your mother in charge, Who could doubt someone so charming, so well-connected, so sweet and reasonable?” (page 374/375, Knopf edition).

He speaks of her work with contempt and distaste, but also in a tone as someone who once fell for her masquerade before fully understanding who she was and her ultimate goal. Being his former lover, he sees the fact she works with the very Church who ruined him because of her, as disgusting despite their weird relationship dynamic, (which I could write a whole essay on but I’m not, because I already did it in college and that essay took me to a very dark place lol) and he despises her relation to the Church far more than he despises the nature of her work. And, as we see in the Amber Spyglass, despite inviting her to come with him, he is not eager to be in her company because he simply doesn’t trust himself when it comes to her and neither does anyone who knows both of them.

But the main reason he didn’t interfere, it’s because Bolvangar’s action, however crude and in favour of his enemies, was something he could take advantage of and their cruelty simply didn’t concern his own work, even if it was a discovery of his own that allowed such a thing. While they were doing something awful, they were too busy to notice his domination over his own house arrest or his plans in general, giving him the time and space he needed to finish his work.

Cruel and straightforward, Asriel is too practical and indecent to say he cared about the children: he hated what they were doing because the Church was tied to it; La Belle Sauvage!Asriel might have interfered and cared about it (he saved gyptian children from a flood, restored Malcolm’s boat, was gentle and wise in a rough way), but Northern Lights!Asriel was simply far too blindsided by his wrath against the Authority and the Church to give a damn. The only moment we see him hesitate is when he sees Lyra in the North, and for a moment he is taken by the shock of thinking he might have to sacrifice Lyra to kill God and destroy the Church, who was trying to, you know, kill Lyra. An ironic and cruel position to put him in, and he would’ve killed her, make no mistake; he keeps away from her because he simply knows he would’ve sacrificed her, or anyone else, including himself, to destroy God and the Magisterium.

Understanding this wild, carefree and inconsequential man is a crude task. The thing is, redemption is an overused trope and not everyone that does something bad needs it (or wants it for the matter), Asriel being the person who least requires it, because:

He is not a villain. I have seen this a lot and it honestly confuses me. Asriel, if anything, plays the part of the antihero, and even then he does so very loosely. We are constantly reassured by him and by basically every third party in the book (Ruta Skadi and her infatuation, John Parry and his wise comprehension, Baruch and Balthamos and their first-hand experience of the Kingdom’s brutality, amongst others) that Asriel is the “hero” of the war, that he is righteous and the one with the right views. He is not your conventional saviour, in fact, he is human and flawed, self-centered and ambitious, but charismatic and knowledgeable; that blur our senses and the lines and we’re stuck thinking he is either a hero or a villain when Asriel is, in fact, neither.

His ultimate goal is clear, albeit readable only between the lines sometimes. He is a liar, arrogant and wrathful, but once we get to the Subtle Knife, his goal is more clear, at least from Thorold and John Parry’s points of view (Ruta Skadi too, but she is far too unreliable for being too infatuated with Asriel): he wants to kill God and take down the Kingdom of Heaven. He says it’s for freedom and blah-blah-blah, and although I believe he seeks that outcome in the end, the reason he is doing this is much more self-serving and closer to revenge rather than doing what is right. He is a spiteful man, whom has been robbed of his wealth and his life by a religious institution who serves God and does anything in the name of God. Asriel wants to take them down because it satiates his need for vengeance, alongside his scholarly nature, by being a pioneer and an explorer of multiple worlds. It’s an ego booster, something to pat yourself on the back for.

He is unapologetic. He never apologises, or seems regretful over his actions. He isn’t apathetic, but he clearly does not resent his own choices. Killing Roger was a tough decision, but one he was intent on making because it was what he needed to do to achieve his purpose (hence his hesitation towards Lyra; he would’ve killed her if Roger wasn’t there). That was by far the most beautiful and sensible death ever written by Pullman: he doesn’t extend it or makes it purposefully dramatic and that’s because Roger’s death was merely a switch for everything else: Lyra and Asriel’s journey. Sir Philip makes us believe that Lyra’s ultimate goal is to stop her warmongering father, then he dismantles Asriel’s portrayal as the endgame bad guy for things of higher nature and Lyra simply stop blaming him, instead blaming herself, and everything she does from them on, is to spite Asriel by always staying away from him and his Republic.

These three aspects of Lord Asriel’s character core are relevant because they exempt him of a redemption arc. He doesn’t need to be redeemed, he asks for no forgiveness and he knew, from the start, where things were going. Perhaps not on Lyra’s account, but the overall outcome of his war. He never backs down, nor hesitates and Ogunwe claims:

“We’re not going to invade the Kingdom,” he said, “but if the Kingdom invades us, they had better be ready for war, because we are prepared.” (page 210, The Amber Spyglass, Knopf edition).

Despite the Republic’s claims of being builders, not conquerors, Asriel was the commander of a massive force and he was, fully aware, that the Kingdom would not leave them be to mind their business. They wanted that war, he wanted that war, and everything he did was because of it. That is why he only is granted peace, in a sense, in death as they plunge down into the abyss; it was a price worth paying for wrecking Heaven. He never truly dies, but instead is forged into oblivion.

A villain can be redeemed, and so can a purposeless character, but Asriel is neither of these things. He has a clear purpose, and he has done good and bad things in his life, he never apologises for what he’s done and he doesn’t intend to. He mimics great rebels of epic stories, and he embodies all that is truthful and essential to human nature: knowledge, passion, rebellious mind, the apex of free will and the wrath against those who do us wrong. He is neither a saint, nor sinner: he is both, as are every person in those books, and he embraces fully his nature. Once again, as Mary said: he’s done bad things, but he isn’t evil himself. No one truly is.

And this is it, sorry for the essay, I have thing for academic men in linen shirts who want to tear Heaven apart lol  @laciefuyu this is for you hahah 

[anonarat]

Witch Blood Chapter 4 & 5

Chapter 4 - Salt and Skin

 It was a few days after her abortive trip with Spite, and Caprice was wrestling with an entirely different problem to her love life. As a precaution, she had withdrawn herself to her writing room, relaxing in the comfortable chair she had positioned in the room, and fiddling with a wooden puzzle from Krat. Mostly it was to give her hands something to do as she wrestled with the conversation at hand.

 You must build up your suite of charms child. Three claws and a scale are hardly sufficient to save a country.

 Why do you insist on calling me child when I am a grown adult? Caprice challenged Prudence, her brow furrowed.

 That is what you focus on? No, of course you do, you have been raised proud, said Prudence, almost to himself, then to answer Caprice’s question, I call you child because everyone here is but a callow youth to me. I have existed near a thousand years. A few short decades are nothing.

 I’m sorry, you’re how old? We were always taught that a spirit was born with the person, why isn’t this more well known.

 Most spirits are, Prudence paused, forgetful. No that’s not quite right, not fully themselves. Most of them are completed when they fuse with a living human. No. Apologies, it has been a long time since I had it explained to me, but what I’ve said should be close enough to the truth that it does not matter. I am different, I was to be your spirit from the outset, that of the one who saves Lach.

 Why did the gods make you so far in advance then? asked Caprice.

 That is a good question, and one that I cannot give you an answer for at the current time. I am certain there was a reason for that decision though. Now, child, you are deflecting.

 I’m sorry that I don’t want to murder innocent people, replied Caprice.

 Then find ones who are not innocent, said Prudence, as if it were the most straightforward and obvious thing in the world.

 That is much easier said than done.

 Let us try a different track then. I know you’ve had lessons in this child. What do you if a stalk of grain is found with Rose Blight?

 You raze the field and salt the earth. And give the farmer a new patch of land.

And there is Rose Blight in this kingdom. The good grain may need to be destroyed to prevent the bad grain from soiling the rest. So too must you destroy something that might be good to protect everyone from what is evil.

 There is a gross difference between grain and a person. Killing the bad along with the good is not acceptable.

 Tell me then, is marching to war to protect homes and people wrong? Killing those who oppose your queen? Some of them are good people, heroes to many at their home, responded Prudence.

 But what they are doing is in service to evil.

 Is it though? You’ve been taught of the horrors that Lach committed in the name of colonisation and the glory of its kings and queens. Should Lach thus be struck down? If that is what you feel child, then do nothing. I assure you that doom is approaching with increasing swiftness, said Prudence, waiting a little before pressing on with his point, Would you be seen in your underclothes as soldiers ransacked Lach? Would you be caught sleeping as your house was set to fire? You must arm yourself child, you must ready yourself for the fight.

 Damn you Prudence, said Caprice, throwing the puzzle in her hands at the far wall. It impacted softly and fell to the carpet, still in one piece.

 Better you and I than the Queendom.

~~~

 So it was that Caprice found herself out hunting again. It had been Prudence’s suggestion that hunting down a selkie blood would be among the best options. Somehow he had some idea of what charms could be made from each of the bloods.

 While a spirit was supposed to guide and help teach the blooded, it was rare that they knew things that they didn’t learn along with the one they were bound to. Certainly they were astute, and did not seem to forget things, it was odd. Perhaps they knew more than the previous spirit bound had said, or perhaps he was explaining the instincts she felt when she had made that first kill. It didn’t really matter how he knew.

 She had learned it when she had first slipped away from herself and made her weapons and armour from the dragon blood. While some of the charms she could make matched with what the blood could do, others seemed to bear no relation to the power of that blood.

 Caprice didn’t really want to admit to herself that after falling in the river the thought of a charm that would let her breath for many hours no matter the situation, was tempting. The second charm she planned on making would be something of a catalyst, or a key. Once consumed, neither poison nor venom would be able to find purchase on her. According to Prudence, the effect differed depending on which blood used the charm, but he only knew the effect on a witch blood.

 The third, and perhaps most useful was a charm that could dissolve the inanimate. Gruesome as it was, it would make the disposal of bodies without evidence considerably easier.

 This had led her down to the docks, where the river bloods congregated. The low blood name for selkie bloods. It still unnerved her that with proper training, any of the low bloods would be the equal of a noble blood. If another country ever realised or knew, they could martial an army on an unprecedented scale.

 As she stole into an alleyway, Caprice’s mind began turning, connecting points of information she hadn’t realised were linked. It was only after the purge of witch bloods that low bloods had begun appearing. Many of the nobility were promiscuous that there were plenty of bastards. Witch bloods needed a blooded to use their power. It was only recently that more claims of bastard ancestry were being brought to the courts.

 Well done child. I’m glad you worked it out by yourself.

 They killed their own children, and the children of others, Caprice felt horror at what her kind had done.

 Indeed. What other way could one gain power and dispose of a bastard at the same time? There was a reason that witch bloods were eventually decried as anathema to all nations.

 I already feel sick. I don’t want to do this.

 You are here now child. Do not waste this opportunity. Each day you are slack is another day when the calamity might overtake the land. Whether you want to or not should not enter the balance of your actions this night.

 Caprice almost ignored Prudence, intending to set off to her home, but his presence weighed heavily in her mind. It was like a strict school teacher standing over her shoulder. All he could do would be to berate her, but Caprice would not be able to escape. She certainly still felt like a child in the face of that.

 At the late hour, the dock area was mostly deserted, with many of the sailors and boat men having taken to the naval quarters that were offered to all who regularly fared across the water. The shipping companies paid a dear enough price for them that they would make sure the crew used them.

 Most vessels would have a sentry or two, and there was no way she would be able to sneak up one of the gangways. No, she was waiting for a ship to come in, or a boat. The winding paths that led away from the docks and to the warehouses were perfect for an ambush. All that was required was patience and finding a suitable straggler.

~~~

 After about three quarters of an hour, Caprice thought that she had found the perfect target. He had been the last one to drop a crate off at the warehouse, and had stopped for a minute to catch his breath. Her knife made quick work of him, her hand covering his mouth as she slit his throat.

 With her teeth grit, Caprice had stuck her hand in the wound, searching for bone. When she’d found it, she tried to enter the same trance as she had with the dragon blood, but to no avail. When she touched the bone, she felt nothing. No power. The man was unblooded. With no choice in the matter, she drew her hand out.

 Gods and damnation, she cursed vaguely towards Prudence, he wasn’t blooded. Curse it all. I’ve just killed someone who shouldn’t have even died. I thought this was supposed to mean something.

 Calm down child. Your nights work is not done yet. If you don’t want his death to be in total vain, you must kill again, replied Prudence, and you must still deal with the body. Leave it until you have the necessary charm.

 She was shaking. It truly was one thing to kill when you knew that it brought you closer to a goal, and quite another to have a life taken for no reason other than a mistake. Already she was cursing herself as a fool. Her breathing becoming rapid. Her arms wrapping around her body trying to elicit some comfort.

 Caprice was thankful that Prudence didn’t say anything as she composed herself, and just remained a comforting presence in her thoughts. Even then it took a while for the shivering to subside, and she felt more herself, albeit with clothes stained with blood. It was a mercy that no others had chosen to take the route that she lay down. None to scream bloody murder.

 I’ll do it, Caprice thought to Prudence, once she had finally calmed down enough, I’ll see this through.

 Good. You are strong enough to do this.

 Like a bloody shadow, Caprice returned to lingering in the dark, waiting for another victim. Even so, she felt sick to her stomach. The stench of blood from the man she had killed surrounded her, his blood stuck to her clothes. She hoped it wouldn’t give her away. Doubts and fears roiled in her stomach. While she had resolved to see this through, it did not make it any easier to actually follow through on that resolve.

 Despite trying to keep calm, fear and dread of discovery rolled around. Her thoughts were plagued with ideas of disaster. It was if she was a stuck cart, the wheels spinning but only ever bringing her back to the same place. She castigated herself for her folly and poor planning. As if everything that could go wrong had done, and would continue to do so.

 Prudence only stepped in to break her out of the harmful cycle when he noticed something that she should really have picked up on herself.

 Child. Can you recognise what you are hearing? There is a group of sailors offloading their cargo now. You have another chance. Be careful and swift.

 Caprice blinked a few times before using the tangible goal in front of herself to propel her forward, out of the quagmire of her mind. While she hadn’t been trained in stealth exactly, etiquette training had included how to move quietly when needed, and now it was very much needed.

 “Gods, this stuff weighs a ton. What are they shipping in these things.”

 “Not for us to worry about. Though probably some of that fancy rock. We were in Varnesse right? And those high and mighty shit heads love that crap.” The sailor speaking spat to punctuate her sentence. It all felt rather vulgar to Caprice, though perhaps she should have expected that, as they didn’t have proper upbringings.

 “You’re probably right. Let’s get it ditched and get to bed.”

 “Screw that. I need a break. I’m good at the water shit, not this hauling about. If you want to carry this the rest of the way yourself, I ain’t going to stop you.”

 That sounds promising, said Prudence.

 “Fine you lazy ass bastard,” said the other sailor, before the pair lowered the crate to the ground at a junction.

 Should I wait? Caprice asked Prudence, her hand shaking as it hovered over her knife.

 Do you want to kill both to have more chances, and more potential charms? Asked Prudence in return.

 I just want this whole thing to be done as swiftly as possible. But I don’t want to kill another unblooded

 Use a claw. You have three, and it will be the surest way. You must get used to collateral damage, and this could reward you well.

 Or lead to another innocent death, replied Caprice

 Stop your complaining child. You are delaying what you must do. You should not put such things off, it will only make them harder.

 It felt as though it was an argument that Caprice could not hope to win, in part because she really did want to return home, and the comfort it provided, away from this dirty, messy, vulgar place. Committing herself, she extended her mind to the claw charm in her pocket and activated it.

 While logically she knew it wouldn’t hurt, Caprice still expected pain as her left arm deformed. There was a sound of tearing cloth as her arm grew thicker, and longer, covered in blood red plates. Instead of fingers, she had razor-sharp talons, sharp enough to cut through most protections, and hot enough to sear the soul.

 The pair of sailors looked up when they heard her, but already she was running towards them from the side alley she had been in.

 “What the-” was all the first sailor managed before she gouged out his chest cavity. She tried to scream, but had not the lungs to push air through her throat. Her companion looked on in shock as he was drenched in her blood. Caprice didn’t hesitate, piercing his skull with her talons.

 As the top of the skull in her hand divided into four neat sections, the sailor’s body fell. Caprice began breathing heavily. Less from the exertion, and more from panic. It had been so terribly easy to kill them, and if she wanted, the charm had more than enough power to maintain this for a good while longer. It was suddenly so very easy to see why witch bloods had been the most feared of all the great bloods. They could burn like the fires of the sun for a short while, a whole life’s worth of power in a few scant hours.

 Make your charms child. And hurry, this place is exposed.

 As ever, Prudence felt like a voice of reason to Caprice, and the bone was so much easier to grasp after she had dissected the pair rather than merely stabbing them. She let her left arm return to normal. What had looked ugly seconds before was returned to just being an arm. There wasn’t even any blood on it.

 Almost as soon as she touched bone, Caprice entered the fugue-like state associated with her blood. While Prudence had known a few of the possibilities, the array of choices she had was nearly dizzying. Despite this, Caprice stuck to the original plan of the charms she would make. Certainly they were beneficial to her current situation, and she could just make different ones later. After all, there were plenty of selkie bloods around now.

 With the resources on the first body, she’d managed the breathing charm, which was small and almost like a fish scale, very different from the dragon scale that she held. The catalyst looked and felt like a piece of raw flesh, albeit bone coloured. The single dissolving charm was a viscous substance. Calling it a dissolving charm was wrong though. It was like an acid that could eat through just about anything when she triggered the charm.

 She was rather fortunate in that the second body was also that of a selkie blood. As she began to work the blood into the bone, she felt a sense of vindication, one of the few emotions to pierce the haze she worked in. It wasn’t exactly satisfaction, it was just the simple fact that her actions were always right.

 As she left the state of working, Caprice trembled. If that was how witch bloods felt while working then it was even clearer how they had gotten so twisted and corrupt. It was a very real danger to her.

 Child, you can think on this later. For now, we must dispose of the remains.

 You’re right. Of course you’re right, thought Caprice back, pocketing the six further acid charms, and the singular charm of fog that she had made.

 Once she had disposed of the bodies and returned home, Caprice got rid of the now ruined clothes she had been wearing. It had been a small mercy that none of the staff had seen her caked in blood and dirt. Stealing into her room, she headed straight to her bathroom to try and clean the blood from her arms and face. No matter how fastidiously she scrubbed, no matter how clean they looked, she still felt dirty.

Chapter 5 - Guin’s Move

 After a restless night of sleep after having gone to bed much too late, Caprice both wanted rest, and knew that no more would be forthcoming. That was probably for the best in truth, for today was the first day she would be attending the royal court. Nothing much would be expected of her at least. Just to watch and listen as various nobles presented their conflicts and request, or observe any judgement that could not have been resolved in a lower court.

 As heir to the last great house, Caprice wouldn’t be in the first two rows of seats, but she would be the closest to the throne on third row of the right-hand side. It was rather comforting to know where she sat, as the jockeying of all the other houses meant you really had to know where you belonged or risk insulting others or denigrating yourself.

 While there were benefits to her position, she would have to make absolutely sure that she appeared suitably awake, and didn’t drift off part way through. She would be in clear sight of the throne, so failing to pay attention would be easily noticeable.

 Stretching and grunting in a rather unesslike fashion, Caprice dragged herself out of her bed. Despite her difficulty sleeping, the light of day made the events of the previous evening seem like nothing but a horrible dream. It disturbed Caprice that she seemed to skirt away from the responsibility of murdering three people.

 When she thought about it directly, she was sick to her stomach. Yet the birds called as they had the previous day. The light was bright and beautiful. Caprice glanced in the mirror. Where last night, she had seen hideousness, and brilliant red stains, now she looked as though nothing had happened.

 You’ve always known that your decisions would affect a great many people, even if you didn’t have the prophecy to fulfil. You’ve been taught to be resilient child, and you will need that resilience to see this through to the end. That you still feel disgusted by your actions is good. Life should never be taken without cause, it’s just that your cause is the greatest the nation has ever known, said Prudence.

 Was that supposed to be in any way comforting, because it really wasn’t.

 I wouldn’t say comforting. It is easy for witch bloods to be consumed with the desire for power. You need that power, but you cannot give into the desire to take for the sake of taking. You have a purpose, and you must see it completed, but I do not want you to lose yourself in the process.

 Thank you Prudence. Gods this is hard though, replied Caprice.

 Things worth doing are rarely easy; but that doesn’t mean you can just abandon them. You have the strength to carry you through this.

Caprice conveyed a feeling of gratitude back to Prudence before ringing the bell to summon Malevolent.

~~~

 While it is wasn’t her first time in the throne room, it was Caprice’s first visit as a noble. It was a genuinely impressive sight. Five rows of tiered seating on either side, with a gorgeous golden Ashan rug leading up to the dais where Queen Apathy von Lach sat. The throne for the prince consort had remained empty since the death of Mediocrity von Lach. To the queen’s left, set slightly back was a second empty throne. Disaster von Lach, heir to the queendom rarely kept up with his appointed duties, according to rumour.

 Allegedly he routinely stumbled into council meetings late and hungover, but the queen tolerated it all. It was as if she was blind to his faults. For all that, Disaster was decisive, and had supported a number of measures that were widely supported among the noble bloods, usually because they helped to line their pockets further. His negotiations with Trivel were also legendary, somehow managing to secure a strong trade deal.

 Further back still sat Malice and Spite. Malice had a bored expression on her face, which lit up when she saw Caprice at the entrance. Spite was busy looking over the agenda, making the odd note next to one of the items. Caprice fought the urge to wave down the hall to the pair. This was neither the time nor the place for such things. She was an adult, she shouldn’t be so childish.

 Looking at Caprice as she walked to her seat, one might have described it as serene or peaceful. In reality, she was just tired and distracted, hiding behind a neutral mask. Only barely did she have the wherewithal to return her father’s nod of acknowledgement as she passed in front of him to reach the stairs up to her seat.

 Even the individual chairs were extravagant. A deep red cushion on each, with a bench extending out from the divider between each row for any papers that the nobility wished to have ready access to. Charity von Leance was seated in the seat that was rightfully Caprice’s. While she had been aware that House von Leance’s star had been rising, she was surprised to see just how far.

 Caprice raised an eyebrow at Charity, both parties knowing full well that Caprice was the higher ranked of the two, despite being functionally unblooded. Charity stared back defiantly at Caprice. For once, Caprice’s exhaustion was a benefit, it was far easier to not look bothered by Charity’s antagonism. So she just kept looking down at Charity until she became too uncomfortable and was forced to move.

 That the other chairs had mostly been already filled meant that Charity could have attempted what Caprice had just done, but she wouldn’t have the excuse of being from a great house. Essentially it had put Charity in an untenable situation. If she tried to exert her position, she would have rubbed a number of other noble bloods the wrong way. Equally, she would have to take a seat much further away if she didn’t force her way in. The whole attempt at a powerplay managed to backfire for her nemesis spectacularly. As Caprice settled in, and directed what attention she had towards queen Apathy, she could here mild disruption as Charity muscled some of the other heirs further down.

 Why did she think that would work? Caprice asked Prudence.

 Likely because you appear to her as unblooded. No doubt there are a group of nobles who feel that you should be seated as far away from the queen as possible, or that you are still just a child.

 Well, you still refer to me as such, said Caprice, needling back in a somewhat friendly manner at the spirit.

 I’m different. I’m like your guardian, and I am very old, replied Prudence, defending himself.

 In that case, should I start referring to you as a gramps?

 Please don’t. That would just serve to undermine any advice I gave you.

 If you keep on calling me child, I may just have to use it as a countermeasure.

 Direct escalation is rarely the correct way to resolve a conflict, said Prudence, and then a pause, just for effect, child.

 Caprice groaned in her head back at Prudence. She didn’t want to annoy him too much, as he often had useful advice, or at least pick up on subtle cues that she would otherwise miss. Well, she wasn’t sure exactly how useful advising someone to murder people was, but even that was supposed to be for a good cause.

~~~

 Biting the inside of her cheek was the main reason that Caprice still looked attentive as the final complaint being lobbied before the queen was being handled. Just as queen Apathy von Lach was making her judgement, one of the highly ranked palace servants approached and whispered something to her. She gave him a nod, and whispered a response back.

 Even in her current state, Caprice could see the bristling among the noble bloods. Clearly this was an unusual occurrence. The queen seemed unphased by the whole thing and resolved the issue in front of her quickly, where previously she had given further thought. Something was happening, so Caprice mustered all her attention to what happened next.

 The Pay attention child, from Prudence was wholly unnecessary, but it wasn’t something that it hurt to re-iterate.

 A pair of servants opened the doors, and the herald announced the visitor to the halls.

 “Your majesty. May I present Mala Requet, High Messenger of Guin.”

 “Enter, and be welcome Mala Requet of Guin. What is the message that you bring so urgently,” said the queen, her voice carrying clear and strong. The high messenger took the invitation and approached, kneeling into a bow at the perfect distance from the queen.

 “Your Majesty. I bid you greetings from the High Enclave of Guin, and Lady Sua, holiest of the gorgon bloods. For too long have our borders been closed to one another, and we would entreat to you that we might send an ambassador to act in Lady Sua’s stead,” said the high messenger clearly.

 “Indeed, it has been a great while. By all accounts you have long been a peaceful nation,” said queen Apathy, subtly referencing the internal conflicts that had prompted the original closing of borders, “might I enquire as to who this ambassador might be?”

 “Of course your majesty. It would be Yvae Margritte, gorgon blood, and priestess to the gods.”

 “You understand that we might be wary of such an individual. We have heard tales of what your gorgon bloods can do.”

 “We understand your majesty. Shall I relay that you wish a different ambassador?”

 The queen tilted her head, her golden eyes skewering the high messenger’s head. She even began tapping the arm to the throne, deep in thought. Declining the offered ambassador would be impolitick, but accepting them would put a deadly snake in close proximity to the royal family.

 Your father just nodded ever so slightly to the queen. I suspect that you are going to be having a guest in the near future.

 “No, we shall welcome Priestess Yvae Margitte to Lach. We will make arrangements for suitable accommodations for her.”

 “You have our thanks your majesty,” said the high messenger before smoothly exiting the throne room. There was a hushed quiet as most of the noble bloods present tried to work out how best they could profit from this sudden change in events. Caprice just wanted to sleep. Mercifully, that was when the queen dismissed the court. While other members of the nobility moved to other rooms to talk and scheme, Caprice just headed home.

[logh-icebergs]

Episode 13: When the Rain of Grief Comes

August 22, 796/487. Kesler travels to a small frontier planet to implement the sinister Oberstein’s Reinhard’s odious plan for weakening the invading Alliance forces: Collect food and supplies from civilians on the frontier so that the invading Alliance, which calls themselves a “liberation force,” will be forced to use their own food, supplies, and money to replenish the depleted stocks. The moral pitfalls of this course of action are explored while Kesler wistfully reunites with an old flame from his youth. Kircheis tries a new tactic for coping with Reinhard’s newfound Machiavellianism, after which the two of them spend a long night together.

Heterosexuality

Recent studies done among adults aged 18-65 in the Galactic Empire have shown that as many as 1 out of every 10 are likely straight. Wow! And yes, just like the average Empire citizen, even Reinhard von Lohengramm knows at least one heterosexual personally. The more you know.

Until this point, there’s been no reason to discuss straight romance in LoGH except to point out that ostensibly hetero situations have been characterized by awkwardness, discomfort, reluctance, and embarrassment. In fact, Rebecca talked early on about how this show uses social awkwardness surrounding straight encounters as one of the weapons in its arsenal of heteronormative “passing” techniques. However, we’ve still consistently been giving consideration to the heteronormative surface readings for many of these scenes—without a point of comparison, there’s been no way to be sure that the LoGH anime team isn’t trying (albeit not very successfully) to write straight romance. Well, our first point of comparison has finally arrived!

After assigning subordinates to take care of Reinhard’s directives on other frontier planets, Extremely Good Boy Ulrich Kesler decides to go himself to Kleingelt, where, it quickly becomes apparent, he grew up. We learn this via a series of interactions between Kesler and Vier, the widowed daughter-in-law of the region’s benevolent ruler, Viscount Kleingelt. It turns out that Vier and Kesler have known each other for a long time, though it’s been a while since they’ve actually seen one another. Through a series of short flashbacks, we learn that the two were, if not boyfriend and girlfriend, at least intending to get together eventually when their progress was interrupted by Kesler enlisting in the military. While Kesler was away, Vier met and married a different man, who was killed after also joining the military, leaving Vier behind with her son and father-in-law.

Kesler and Vier’s story, contained as it is to one episode (and entirely original to the anime), is straightforward and, though touching, honestly not particularly interesting on its face: A young man and woman had feelings for each other; war intervened (by the man’s choice); now it’s too late for them to overcome the years of distance; war separates them again (this time by the woman’s choice). But it’s the very fact of how simple and direct this story is that makes it hold more significance in the context of LoGH’s approach to romance as a whole than it might at first appear to do.

Given that relying on shortcuts gets us nowhere in LoGH, how can we tell this is romantic? The lighting, the subject of conversation, and the fade into a flashback at the end are all indicators.

What episode 13 begins to prove is that the creators of LoGH are perfectly capable of writing clear, unequivocal romance between a man and a woman. In other words, the muddled and confusing straight romance-like scenarios scattered throughout LoGH are not the result of poor writing or directing, but of an intentionality to convey something other than heterosexual romantic love.

Again as Rebecca mentioned in her episode 6 post, awkwardness and authentic romance are not mutually exclusive, and of course plenty of people in mature, healthy, requited relationships experience insecurity, embarrassment, and so on. But the levels of negativity on display whenever most of LoGH’s presumptive hetero couples are on screen together aren’t indicative of the normal stress associated with crushes or the early stages of a relationship—they’re indicative of genuine unhappiness. Kesler and Vier’s relationship is fraught: In the past, he chose the life of a soldier over a life at home with her; in the present, there’s too much history and distance between them even to consider giving it another go. But the question of their attraction to one another is not what complicates their relationship; that question has already been answered, and is not up for debate.

There’s no ambiguity here: Vier and Kesler are both smiling; their body language is open, enthusiastic, and comfortable; this is two people flirting with each other not because of external pressure or to cloak a queer romance from a homophobic audience, but because it’s an expression of how they feel.

It’s not necessary for the show’s creators (or characters) to code straight romance, so when LoGH shows us an unambiguously interested hetero couple, they can use explicit cues (like marriage-related language in the above gif) to tell us point blank that’s what they’re doing, while using implicit cues (body language, camera movement, etc) to reinforce and deepen the viewer’s understanding of the relationship. Queer romances, on the other hand, don’t have the luxury of being conveyed with anything other than implicit cues.

As a result, the presence of uncomplicated straight romance in LoGH is something like a decoder key: We can take the implicit language used to portray both hetero and queer relationships, and use it to extrapolate the corresponding explicit language that can only be used for straight relationships onto queer relationships.

For example, the visual and contextual similarities between this moment from episode 4 and Ulrich’s playful chasing of Vier in episode 13 are striking.

In this way, with a little help from its rare straight characters, LoGH does away with the need for overt explanations of queer romances while still making them perfectly easy to find and interpret as long as you’re paying attention. And speaking of queer romance...

Reinhard and Kircheis

After sharing his controversial “starve them out” plan with his admiralty, Reinhard looks to Kircheis for his thoughts and finds his gaze studiously averted.

For the last few Empire-side episodes, we’ve been blissfully distant from the high-level strategic machinations that are driving a wedge between Reinhard and Kircheis. Episode 13, while it doesn’t address the issue as directly as, say, episode 8, brings the growing Oberstein-related tension between Reinhard and Kircheis back into sharp focus.

After his attempts to dissuade Reinhard from hiring and listening to Oberstein were unsuccessful, Kircheis seems to have decided to deal with the situation by trying to ignore it, which might work if Reinhard weren’t accustomed to getting Kircheis’s input on every little thing. As the situation stands, Kircheis’s silence is noticeable in the extreme, and adds strain to their interactions... at least at first.

This whole conversation illustrates how on different pages Reinhard and Kircheis are right now, but the setting and composition of the scene are still romantic as hell, starting with the door Kircheis evidently closed behind him...

...and ending with the camera’s slow pan to the stars, leaving Reinhard and Kircheis safely out of our field of vision as they decide how to spend the “long night.”

When next we see our heroes, the mood has changed. It’s morning, the sun is streaming through the clouds, and dew glistens on the flowers outside Reinhard’s window—the same window at which the two were standing the night before. In fact it’s implied that they haven’t left the room: The door behind Kircheis is still closed, and when he appears, it’s from off to the side; they’ve been there together all night.

We’ve already given straightwashing more time than it deserves, but it keeps happening so we’ll keep calling it out: Above, the word Kircheis uses is neither “sentimental” (fansubs on the left) or “womanish” (official subs on the right); what he says is memeshii (女々しい), which means “effeminate.”

As is obvious from that exchange alone, the vibe between Reinhard and Kircheis has changed as much as their surroundings—they’re both softer, more playful. Reinhard smiles as he affectionately teases Kircheis, who averts his eyes bashfully (a dramatic contrast to his stiff cold shoulder earlier on in the episode) while very romantic music swells in the background. Smiling, he then responds unequivocally with a relatably self-deprecating comment about how gay he is. LoGH is making it absolutely crystal clear how exactly Reinhard and Kircheis managed to relieve all that tension between them in the span of a single night.

Stray Tidbits

Kesler’s shock here at seeing the alphabet typed out in order on a computer screen is a gift.

Vier's husband said he joined the military and died, but it’s obvious from this hair shot that he actually ran away to become a romance novel cover model.

I’m glad we now know for sure that Kesler canonically sleeps in 1. his belt and 2. his shoes.

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/floating-cities-fantasy-or-the-future/

Floating cities - fantasy or the future?

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Media captionFloating cities – fantasy or the future?

Floating cities have long seemed like a utopian pipedream based on little more than fantasy.

But this week the concept appeared to take a step closer to reality through a UN-backed partnership.

UN-Habitat, which works on sustainable urban development, will team up with private firm Oceanix, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and The Explorers Club, a professional society that promotes scientific exploration around the world, to further the idea.

As climate change advances at an alarming rate and huge numbers of people cram into city slums, “floating cities is one of the possible solutions”, UN-Habitat’s executive director, Maimunah Mohd Sharif, says.

How would it work?

Oceanix City, or the world’s first sustainable floating city, would essentially be groups of hexagonal platforms – anchored to the seabed – that could each house around 300 people, effectively creating a community for 10,000 residents.

Cages under the city could harvest scallops, kelp, or other forms of seafood.

Marc Collins Chen, the chief executive of Oceanix, said the technology to build large floating infrastructure or housing already exists.

“The biggest question in people’s minds is if these cities can actually float,” Mr Collins Chen told the BBC.

“There are thousands of such houses in the Netherlands and other communities around the world. It is now a question of scale and creating integrated systems and communities.”

Image copyright Oceanix

Image copyright Oceanix

Concerns have been raised that floating cities could be perceived as a quick fix to dealing with the dangers of climate change and rising sea levels.

“The caution I have is that sometimes people advance futuristic ideas of this sort as a way of saying climate change isn’t so bad because if it happens we’ll find a way around it,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2017.

But Mr Collins Chen said Oceanix was working with a “solid team” of experts in waste management, water engineering, marine regeneration and energy efficiency.

The cities could also be a defence against natural disasters, he said.

“Floating cities will be located specifically in sites where they will have sufficient water depth to not be impacted by tsunamis,” he said, adding that the platforms could also withstand floods and hurricanes.

Are the plans realistic?

“The main obstacles at this point are psychological and are not technological,” Richard Wiese, president of The Explorers Club, told the BBC.

“People psychologically get nervous at the term ‘floating city’. I used this term to my wife, and her immediate response was not technological but rather visceral, she didn’t like the idea of something that could drift away.”

To gain the confidence of the general masses and politicians, Mr Wiese said the creation of small extensions to existing cities could be necessary to start with, picking out Hong Kong, New York or Boston as potential testing grounds.

Beyond housing solutions, Mr Wiese said floating hospitals being towed to disaster areas was another idea being floated.

Image copyright Oceanix

Image copyright Oceanix

One of the obvious issues facing Oceanix City is that it lacks funding.

“[Those] that fund infrastructure tend to be very conservative,” said Steve Lewis, founder of Living PlanIT, a group that focuses on new approaches to urban planning and development.

“They tend to invest in things they understand well and then you come along and say you’re building a town floating on the ocean and they go ‘really?'”

However Mr Lewis, who now focuses on investing in smart cities, pointed to the boom in wind farms over the past 20 years as evidence that attitudes can change.

Although a floating settlement on such a scale would be unprecedented and would throw up plenty of technical challenges, Mr Lewis said the structures would actually be relatively straightforward to put together.

“Proof is in the pudding and we’ll see how it actually turns out,” he said.

“But I think we need to push the boundaries of what new life looks like in different environments. Even if it doesn’t house 10,000 people, I think communities of a few thousand would benefit.”

Image copyright Oceanix

Mr Wiese of The Explorers Club said that selling the idea to investors and the public need not be a “doomsday bunker scenario”.

“We need to demonstrate that it is an enjoyable, sustainable and economic advancement that will apply to all portions of the population and not just wealthy enclaves,” he said.

“If you look at Apollo 11, you have to remember that there were many small steps to create a moon launch,” he added.

Images subject to copyright

[eelgibbortech-blog]

Client management the Mad Men way, with infographic (July 2017)

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This July, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the premier of season 1, episode 1 of Mad Men, the 1960s era show that validated and united everyone who’s worked in advertising.

Ten years later, we’re still nostalgically sharing marketing insights coined by Don Draper and consoling ourselves with Roger Sterling’s account management axioms:

“My father used to say this is the greatest job in the world except for one thing: the clients.”

Ahh… the double-edged sword of clients.

Despite his mastery of persuasion, Don Draper couldn’t handle client management on his own. After losing the Hilton account, he confessed:

“I can sell ideas, but I’m not an account man.”

If even Don couldn’t hack it, what hope is there for the rest of us who are trying to manage clients and creative work sans account team? Well here’s the thing – Don may not have been an account man, but he was surrounded by some really good ones. And there’s plenty we can do with what they shared in Mad Men’s seven seasons.

So I’ve assigned myself the oh-so-difficult job of binge-watching Mad Men to collect these 5 lessons on account management. They’re good for the 21st century, too. And perfect even if you’re in a creative agency of one.

1. “Stop writing down what I ask for, and try to figure out what I want”

Application: Learn about your clients’ desires, culture and communication styles.

Remember the scene? Heinz baked beans could not be satisfied. They rejected every creative approach presented, and they were getting tired of saying no. Peggy met their specific requests, but had failed to understand their desires.

(Image source)

In your role as a copywriter, you need to get inside the heads of your target audience.

In your role as account manager, you need to get inside the head of your client.

Readers of Copy Hackers know that you can learn a lot about your target audience from review mining. This is much harder to do when you have an audience of one, and when you’ve never met that person IRL. Here are some tricks to make it a bit easier to figure out what your client wants.

Use social profiles to connect (but don’t be creepy about it)

It’s not always easy to discover your clients’ interests outside of the projects you’re working on. One way to get to know you them better is from their social media profiles.

Help desk software company Groove does this well. Groove follows its customers, taking note of interesting Tweets and mentioning them in their interactions.

If a company with over 6,000 users can stay connected to its clients with social media, it might work for you too. It also might make you feel like a stalker just thinking about it, which could be why you’re not doing it already.

Selling 1-to-many products online is a different game than nurturing 1-to-1 client relationships, where you’re more colleague than company. If you’re worried about crossing the line between light intel and full-blown creepster, ask yourself:

What would Zappos do?

Zappos retweets great customer quotes.

Zappos does not troll through its customer’s daughter’s birthday albums, liking and commenting on the photos.

Being professionally connected to your clients can give you valuable insights into how they see themselves (like discovering the reason your client never opens your reports is because she identifies as a storyteller who’s a marketing manager in title only).

Learn their preferred communication style

Find out what your clients want by figuring out their personality and communication style.

There’s no shortage of profiling systems. I like any framework that can be useful without needing to administer an actual test. The DiSC framework is helpful since it can be focused on workplace behavior.

You can assess your client just with a squint test, and use your findings to inform your interactions. How you’d craft an effective client email, for example, would depend on their DiSC profile:

Dominance (D-style): Keep the email brief and use a subject line that gets to the point.

Influence (i-style): Use energetic language. Exclamation marks and emoticons are usually appropriate.

Steadiness (S-style): Use polite, courteous language and make them feel needed.

Conscientiousness (C-style): Write a straightforward email that includes details, objectives and expectations.

If you want more profiling nerdiness, Crystal is an app that estimates DiSC-style personality insights based on social media and other data. Here’s a screenshot of Crystal telling me to chill out in my communications with a client:

There’s a lot your clients value that they won’t tell you directly.  Profiling can help you anticipate needs and adjust your approach.

Learn the company culture & stages of change

To help your client grow, you need to start where they are. What does the company believe about itself and its customers? What are your client’s core values and mission?

If you don’t know how to answer this, you can usually find it on LinkedIn or the current version of their website. As self-delusional or inaccurate as this material may be, there’s a reason it had sign-off and is live today.

As an account manager, you’ll need to work with, not against, your client’s existing beliefs and values. You should also know why your clients chose you as a partner. Was it:

Fit. Your voice and approach are a perfect match for your client.

Aspiration. Your client sees your work or process and thinks “we need that here.”

Change agent. Your direct contact likes your style, and wants you to help change an organization that doesn’t yet agree there’s a problem.

Hired muscle. You’re there to get work done, not challenge the status quo.

Change is not easy. It happens in stages, over time. Knowing what your client believes and what your role is will help you determine how much effort is necessary to “nudge” your client towards new beliefs and worldviews.

Unless you’re a perfect fit for your client, you’re likely to meet resistance as your client begins to consider and take steps toward the next stage of change.

Whether you’re involved in a rebrand, a push for testing, a change in positioning or any other challenge to their identity or culture, understanding the stages of change will help to know how to best manage the relationship.

2. Your work doesn’t speak for you

Application: Show your client the process and benefits of your work.

Remember the scene? Don Draper is man of mystery. Never one to talk about his past, he demurred in an important interview, resulting in an underwhelming article and a lost opportunity for publicity. Don defended his approach, saying “my work speaks for me.” Bert Cooper shot back “turning creative success into business is your work. And you’ve failed.”

(This image is from the end of the episode, where Don does a 180 and owns the interview. Watch the clip here.)

As creatives, we want our work to stand on its own, no explanation needed.

So there’s a certain kind of punch-in-the gut disappointment that comes when you’ve sent your client your best, most compelling creative work, and the email you get back says:

This is not what I expected. Can you explain your process here?

Luckily, the discipline of conversion copywriting has armed you with a deep knowledge of persuasion that can be applied to client management and business success.

Reverse the Curse of Knowledge

We’re trapped by the curse of knowledge, meaning that once we know something, we forget what it’s like to not know it. We forget that most of our clients don’t specialize in our field and don’t intuitively understand the benefits of the work we provided.

Features and benefits for the win

At some point in your copywriting career, you’ve probably lectured patiently educated another person about the difference between features and benefits.

Features are what the product does

Benefits are what the features solve

Good copy is benefits-focused. So are good client presentations and deliverables.

Think of features as your deliverables and their components: Sales pages, emails, cross-heads, fascinators, tone, social proof, etc.

Benefits are how the features will help your clients get the outcome they want. What’s the benefit of running this email? How will using testimonials improve conversion rates?

Until you have sign-off (and sometimes even after that), you’re still “selling” your ideas to a client who doesn’t know how your work will solve his problem. As in the comic below, paint a picture of the result for clients, don’t just hand them a can of (powerful, high-converting) spinach.

(Image source)

You don’t need to unpack every choice or quantify its expected lift, but providing some high-level prompts of “so you can…” or “this helps to…” can give your client the context she needs to understand and agree with your strategy.

The “because” technique

Giving people a reason — any reason — to say yes is usually better than no reason at all. A 1978 study showed that people were just as likely (93% vs 94%) to let others cut in line for a copier if they had a placebic, obvious reason (“because I need to make some copies”) as they were for a real reason (“because I’m in a rush”).

Creating a habit of offering a reason, even if it seems self-evident (“because the research shows this is what your customers want”), can help combat the curse of knowledge and get client buy-in.

Cheat your way to more transparency

Everyone wants to buy from companies that are transparent, and many people insist they’ll pay more for transparency. Whether or not that’s true, being transparent and being perceived as transparent can involve different values and skillsets.

I feel I’m being transparent if I have nothing to hide; I’m honest and meet my deadlines.

But my client doesn’t feel I’m transparent. The project is due next week and she doesn’t know if I’m 20% done or 90% done. She doesn’t know anything about my process. She’s needlessly anxious and frustrated by all the unknowns.

Harvard marketing professor Michael Norton says that to be transparent, we should have a strategy in place to show our work. He uses Domino’s Pizza Tracker as a case study for how businesses can be more transparent.

The pizza tracker is a wildly successful web app that shows the steps of preparing a pizza. But it doesn’t actually reveal new information: we already know the steps and sequence for pizza delivery.

So what makes the tracker such a huge hit? This is Norton’s explanation of why people love it (you can watch the 3 minute clip here):

“There’s something very psychologically compelling about…being able to see that it’s happening.  We really like to feel that there’s a person, scrambling around doing stuff for us, because it means we’re really important.

The more we can see into the process…the more we feel really good about the output of that process.”

Even if it’s human nature, having a client who delights in my scrambling to finish tasks for him is at odds with my ideal workflow. I’d rather go the Domino’s route of providing that feeling of transparency, without actually checking in every hour, being micromanaged, or resorting to passive-aggressive communication until one of us fires the other.

The pizza tracker’s success can be explained by the labor illusion: people are happier if they feel like we’re working harder for them – whether or not it’s true, and whether or not it improves the outcome.

Here are some ways to show your client all your hard work:

Use a collaboration tool. With a shared collaboration app (like Slack, Trello or Basecamp), the work you do stays top-of-mind, rather than lost in a crowded inbox. Let wins and milestones linger, rather than immediately archiving completed work.

Share the steps. Create distinct steps on the path between start and done, and help your clients know where you are on the journey. Document and communicate the tasks. “Phases” are good, checklists are awesome. (If you know how to use an actual progress bar for this, please share in the comments.)

Break up deadlines. This is especially useful for large projects that you’re likely to procrastinate anyway. Assign due dates to smaller steps of the process, rather than having everything due at once.

3. Don’t let your client near the check

Application: Give your clients the VIP treatment and remove the “pain of paying.”

Remember the scene? Legendary account man Roger Sterling gave Lane Pryce some sage advice as he prepared for his first client dinner. Among secrets of which drink to order and how to get the client to fill out his own RFP, he suggested: “Get your answers; be nice to the waiter; don’t let him near the check.”

(Image source)

As a copywriter in the internet age, you’re probably not closing clients over steak dinners or renewing contracts from courtside seats. I’ll be forever grateful that I can keep clients without having to play golf.

But there’s a hidden cost to this low-cost way of business: losing the chance to grab the check. There are some real advantages to giving clients the VIP treatment. Here’s how to be the hero without buying the next round.

How to “get the check” with strategic gifting

Smart account managers wine & dine and otherwise lavish attention on their clients to leverage the rule of reciprocity, which is that people are likely to return the favor and give back (in the form of loyalty, repeat business, referrals, etc).

John Ruhlin, author of Giftology: The Art and Science of Using Gifts to Cut Through the Noise, Increase Referrals, and Strengthen Retention, says that most businesses miss out on the powerful rewards of gifting for a simple reason: we aren’t focused on it. We’re too busy running the day-to-day.

Here are some of John’s spot-on suggestions for how to gift strategically:

Make a plan for gifting. Keep a grateful mindset, and reinvest in the people who helped you get where you are.

Give inspirational, “just because” gifts that provide real value. Gifts that are merely transactional (thanks for the referral) can feel tit for tat and have less impact.

Get the most bang for your gifting buck by avoiding “crowded” times (Nov – December) or expected occasions.

There’s a difference between a gift and a promotional item. If it has your brand on it, it’s a marketing tool. Real gifts are engraved with the recipient’s name, not yours.

You can “validate and fascinate” your clients by paying attention to what’s going on in their lives. Here’s an example of ConvertKit getting it right:

(Facebook screenshot, used with permission)

Show appreciation for the people who help your projects get done

Not only can gifting deepen client relationships, it can also help establish a better working environment. Here’s one more example of the power of gifting, for good measure…

My friend Becca works full-time on a sheep dairy farm, and she freelances as a data analyst. Her screen time is quite limited due to her massive chore schedule. She needs to get all the data in the right format on the first try to stay productive during her office hours. That almost never happens.

The reason Becca isn’t answering her email.

One of Becca’s district contacts is especially responsive and accurate with data pulls, so Becca sent a nice box of chocolates to express her gratitude. Her contact feels appreciated in a thankless data job and keeps prioritizing Becca’s work. Becca’s attempt at work-life balance is much easier.

Don’t charge your clients for each bite of pizza

If you want to keep your clients happy paying your fees, consider their psychological triggers around pricing. Your clients, like their customers, overvalue free. Dan Ariely explains:

FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is.

Create bonuses, value-adds and (reasonable) all-inclusive services. Keep these extras top-of-mind in your deliverables and invoicing. Help your client maximize perceived wins and minimize perceived losses when it comes to their budgets.

Ariely also points out that people go to absurd lengths to avoid the pain of paying.

In one study, a pay-per-bite fee structure turned a nice Italian meal into an evening of agony for his students.

(Image source)

Here are some suggestions for how to make the pain of paying less intense for your clients, modified from Dianna Booher’s  What More Can I Say?:

Bundle items to increase perceived value, and reduce the number of small purchases your client needs to make.

Offer different payment options and terms, including payment plans.

Don’t make your client feel nickel-and-dimed by adding small fees after the primary sale. (The more you think through the full scope of similar projects, the easier this gets.)

You can also minimize or restructure unsexy business costs. Let clients see certain fees are waived or included for them.

4. Half the time in this business, it comes down to, “I don’t like that guy”

Application: People aren’t just motivated by outcomes. Be Likable.

Remember the scene? Sales were flat for Admiral Televisions, and arch-rival-to-the-entire-Creative-Department Pete Campbell had an innovative solution. By advertising to a high-value, untapped demographic, Admiral could reach a warm market and secure affordable media space. Unfortunately, his racist clients didn’t care for the opportunity, or him.

After the meeting, Pete protests, “It seems illogical to me that they would reject an opportunity to make more money.”

(Image source)

Roger was not sympathetic. “I don’t know if anyone ever told you,” he said, “half of this business comes down to ‘I don’t like that guy.’” (Watch the clip here.)

People like you less if you don’t care about them

Researcher Wendy Levinson observed that there are 2 kinds of physicians: those who get sued and those who don’t. Quality of care being equal, the surgeons who were never sued had this in common: They spent longer with their patients, were more likely to participate in active listening, were more likely to explain their process and laughed easier.

Doctors with good bedside manner are more liked by their patients – who knew?

But “be friendly and likable” can be intimidating (if obvious) advice, especially for those of us who don’t identify as popular or extraverted or someone whose heart doesn’t start beating faster when the phone makes that “ringing sound.”

Keeping that study in mind, let’s flip the learnings and look at what the sued doctors have in common:

They were rushed and didn’t spend much time with their patients.

They didn’t actively listen or validate.

They didn’t explain what they were doing.

They didn’t find ways to connect and laugh with their patients.

These frequently sued doctors assumed their role as an authority excused them from being caring and empathetic. It didn’t. It never does.

Your clients are no different from these patients. Outcomes matter, but we’d all rather have great outcomes delivered by someone who isn’t cold or hostile. Especially when we’re scared or confused or our narrative is being threatened, we want to be treated with care and dignity.

The bar for being likable is not that high – you don’t need to win a congeniality contest, you just gotta treat your clients like people, and treat people like they matter.

Your client is driven by her dreams and fears, not “data”

Conversion copywriting is an increasingly measurable field. Especially when it comes to testing, we talk a lot about removing our own ego to “let the data decide.” The paradox is this:

Our clients are not data-driven. They are emotion-driven.

Your client wants to stop the test early because he doesn’t want to waste more money on a losing test (loss aversion), even though statistical significance hasn’t been reached.

She crafts self-soothing, unlikely theories about why her favorite variation lost (it kept the wrong kinds of people from buying) because of ego involvement.

When he agrees to the winning treatment, it’s not because he’s a cylon programmed to value wins over losses – it’s because he’s a human who likes to win.

You already know that people buy with emotion and justify with logic. But how do you win your clients over emotionally in a data-driven industry? Persuasion expert Blair Warren says:

People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies.

Think for a minute about difficult clients you’ve had and how you’ve responded to them.

Did you “set expectations” for their million-dollar ideas, rather than praising their ambition?

Did you let them know they weren’t seeing better results because their strategy, funnel, page or product was weak?

When they looked to you for projected outcomes, did you remind them there are no guarantees?

Did you set them straight that what they suspect is the problem isn’t actually the problem?

Did you suggest that their preoccupation with their competition is misplaced?

Confession: I’ve done all those things. This is not easy stuff to put in practice. But I’ve learned that when I react to a client as if the situation is “me vs you,” even if what I’m saying is 100% correct, they don’t care. When I reframe as “us vs them,” I can provide the same information, and I usually manage to get buy-in.

5. If you don’t like what they’re saying, change the conversation

Application:  Reframe the conversation to keep your client focused on what matters.

Remember the scene? Is change good or bad? You can’t win taking sides on that question. So when Don was asked to fight bad publicity about Madison Square Garden, he didn’t try to convince Manhattan they were wrong.

“If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.”

(Image source)

Don reframed Penn Station’s stalemate debate about the merits of change into an inspiring promise of rebirth for a decaying city. Was SCDP really fired by its biggest client (Lucky Strike cigarettes)? No, his agency is just committed to health and could no longer promote tobacco.

Everyone with clients should learn the art of reframing, or we’ll find we “don’t like what’s being said” far too often.

The surprising reason we give so much attention to things that don’t matter

In subjective fields like design and copywriting, strategy meetings often devolve into discussions about button size, word choice and colors. Parkinson’s Law of Triviality explains this phenomenon:

The less important a subject is, the more time people will spend discussing it.

This principle (also known as the bike shedding effect) is not as cynical as it may sound.

People (not just clients, this includes you and me) are 1) more likely to have opinions about subjects we understand, and 2) less likely to weigh-in about a subject we’ve never heard of or can’t relate to.

I have nothing to say about the critical debugging problem the programmers are grappling with, but I have some strong opinions about why the graphic above is not attractive enough to be used in this article.

Your clients want to feel like their ideas are important. Owning and reframing the conversation lets you leverage their interest in contributing, without treating them like the Creative Director or Editor-in-Chief. (Really, what do we expect if we’re emailing documents and asking for feedback and edits?)

How one designer convinces his clients that “shop talk” is uncivilized

Here’s how Pentagram principal designer Michael Bierut reframes the conversation with his clients. He says:

“I do anything to avoid talking about typefaces, white space, composition, or colors. When the subject comes up, I act as if that’s something civilized people shouldn’t be discussing during business hours…

If you do it right, the conversation you have with the client is 99% about their business and their goals, 1% about these esoteric tools we have at our disposal to help them achieve those goals.”

Bierut frets about typefaces for “hours on end.”

But not in front of clients.

Keep clients focused on their goals, not their opinions

Give clients a framework and criteria to evaluate the project. Paul Boag recommends giving your client a specific role based in their expertise:

Focus on the user: Keep the client thinking about what the user needs.

Focus on the business: It’s the client’s job to ensure any design meets business objectives.

Focus on the problem: The client’s job is to identify problems. It’s your job to suggest solutions.

Over on the Copywriter Club podcast, Joanna Wiebe shared some ideas for reviewing copy. She suggests sending the copy an hour before the review. In the review, don’t jump into showing them the copy. Instead, lead clients through the process you followed to arrive at that copy, like so:

These are the goals. This is what you wanted us to work toward. Here’s what we learned… As a reminder, here’s the process that we go through to arrive at this copy that I’m about to present to you today. Here are some interesting findings and now here is the copy and let me walk you through it.

Framing the conversation around goals and processes helps clients understand how to meaningfully contribute and can keep the Law of Triviality at bay.

When all else fails…

For those times when a client refuses to let go of her need to “make a mark” on the project…

Offer functionally useless choices. If your client must touch the project creatively, you can let her make functionally useless choices. Just like you’d encourage a toddler to choose between the blue shirt and the yellow shirt, give your clients options that won’t affect the outcome of the project (hair color of the avatar, name of the test or treatment, etc).

Thank you, Buzzfeed, for making us feel like our random choices matter.

Try the duck technique (use with caution!): Some frustrated creatives resort to the duck technique, where they intentionally add a decoy to their work to give clients something to correct. This can backfire if the client likes the decoy, or if the decoy makes you look incompetent for not having corrected it yourself. Be sure to only use decoys that won’t harm your credibility if they’re approved.

Your 5 Take-Aways for Client Management

Lesson 1: Find ways to meaningfully connect and communicate with clients. Learn what drives them to say yes, and how to help them make changes.

Lesson 2: Overcome the curse of knowledge by showing your clients the benefit of your work. Keep them happy by showing the steps of your work.

Lesson 3: Use strategic gifting and help clients avoid the “pain of paying.”

Lesson 4: Clients are not data-driven. Apply Blair Warren’s one-sentence persuasion plan to keep them happy and on your side.

Lesson 5: Keep clients focused on goals, not opinions. Give them a framework to use to review the project.

To help you remember even more of Mad Men’s lessons for account management, check out this handy infographic:

I’ve used the titles account executive (AE), account manager and client manager interchangeably, as if they’re the same role. They aren’t. But if you’re wearing all the hats anyway, there’s not a meaningful difference.

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[footyplusau]

Liked the look of

Josh Green impressed in his first outing for Essendon on Thursday night

Collingwood v Essendon

Tom Phillips (Collingwood) The Magpies will place plenty of hope in their younger brigade this year and the early signs are that Phillips will play an important part of that. The hard-running midfielder was excellent against the Bombers on Thursday night, gathering a team-high 24 disposals. He works hard, carries the ball and makes smart decisions. The 20-year-old played six games in his debut season last year but should be in for plenty more given what he showed in the opening JLT Community Series game.

Josh Green (Essendon) Green isn’t necessarily a new face, given his 81-game career at the Brisbane Lions. But he’s new to the red and black and showed signs against Collingwood he can add some spark and a different dimension to Essendon’s forward half. Green is crafty, looks fitter than the end of his time at the Lions, and knows his way around a forward line to hit the scoreboard. The free agent could be a nice addition to Essendon’s setup. – Callum Twomey

Hawthorn v Geelong

Kade Stewart (Hawthorn) It was a straightforward decision for the Hawks to elevate the left-footed midfielder to the primary list after three promising appearances at senior level while a rookie last year. There are spots aplenty available in the Hawthorn midfield and Stewart staked a claim on Friday night with a solid 14-possession outing that included two goals including the match-winner on the final siren. He also led the Hawks with nine tackles and laid a key smother. There are elements of his game that are similar to the departed Jordan Lewis, in that he is equally comfortable inside and out and he is a dependable kick for goal. 

Zach Guthrie (Geelong) The Cats’ rookie put his head in the hole in the last quarter when things got tight on Friday night, when for a time the two clubs forgot it was just a pre-season game. Guthrie had 24 possessions – 20 were handballs – and also kicked a goal in the third term when Geelong went on a rampage. Importantly, he didn’t look rattled after a torrid time on Cyril Rioli early on. Cam Guthrie is now one of the most important players at Geelong, but the bloodlines are impressive and younger brother Zac would appear to have the makings of a senior AFL player down the track. Playing or writing, the Guthries know their football. – Ashley Browne

Stewart kicks the match-winning goal for Hawthorn on Friday night. Picture: AFL Photos

Greater Western Sydney v West Coast

Lachlan Tiziani (Greater Western Sydney) The small forward showed plenty of zip early and kicked the opening goal of the game after finding space to mark uncontested inside 50. Tiziani only picked up 12 disposals for the game but when he did get it, his pace and smarts showed he definitely has a bright future. It was a promising effort from the young man who was overlooked at the 2015 NAB AFL draft, and while his senior opportunities might be scarce this season, he might be one to keep an eye on.

Francis Watson (West Coast) On a day when most of the Eagles’ youngsters failed to have an impact on the game, Watson was a massive positive for Adam Simpson’s side. The rookie-listed defender from the Kimberley region in the far north of Western Australia was prepared to back himself when he had the footy in his hands, and wasn’t afraid to come off his man to help other teammates under pressure at a marking contest. Watson was creative across half back, gathered 15 touches, and took seven marks against the Giants. – Adam Curley

Lachlan Tiziani celebrates the opening goal against GWS. Picture: AFL Photos

Western Bulldogs v Melbourne

Travis Cloke (Western Bulldogs) After 246 games with Collingwood, and just 13 senior appearances in the black and white last season, the questions were going to come: Is Travis Cloke a spent force? The power forward answered that query with a resounding ‘no’ in his first pre-season game for his new club on Saturday. Cloke booted a goal, a supergoal and took eight marks (three contested) with the 29-year-old looking zippy and in great condition ahead of his 13th AFL season. Cloke played up the ground at times and used his endurance to advantage as well. The fast-paced Bulldogs style looks set to suit him inside forward 50 in 2017. 

Sam Weideman (Melbourne) Jesse Hogan did the damage on the scoreboard with four goals against the Bulldogs, but second-year forward Sam Weideman also impressed as he looks to establish his place in Melbourne’s best 22. Weideman has put on four kilograms since the start of pre-season and has worked diligently on his leading patterns and contest work with offensive coordinator Troy Chaplin this pre-season. Weideman, 19, naturally complements the bash-and-crash style of Hogan, given his leaping ability and mobility inside the forward 50 arc. – Ben Guthrie

Sydney v North Melbourne

Sam Reid (Sydney) It has been a long wait for the forward, not having played in almost 18 months after hamstring and calf issues. While he had only nine disposals, there were glimpses of the skills that made him an integral part of the 2012 premiership side. He worked up to the half-back flank at times, showing he will be able to use his tank to be a link-up option. Reid’s absence has been felt at the Swans, with their attack looking too focused on Lance Franklin at times, especially since Kurt Tippett moved into the ruck. More game time in the JLT Community Series should allow Reid to keep improving ahead of the home and away season.

Braydon Preuss (North Melbourne) The Roos’ back-up big man came to the attention of the football world when he laid a spear tackle on former skipper Andrew Swallow in an intraclub match. That take-no-prisoners approach clearly wasn’t a one-off, with his physicality obvious to all in the ruck. While’s there’s no doubt Todd Goldstein is the premier big man at the Roos, Preuss offers different qualities in the contest and showed enough to suggest he can be a capable stand-in if necessary. His aerial prowess was also on show when he took an impressive mark deep in defence with the clock ticking down in the second quarter.

Braydon Preuss contests the ruck against Sydney’s Kurt Tippett. Picture: AFL Photos

Gold Coast v Brisbane Lions

Pearce Hanley (Gold Coast) At his best, Hanley was always going to be a great addition for the Suns. However, after two average seasons marred by a hip operation in 2015 and poor form in 2016, the question was, would the 28-year-old get back to his game-breaking peak? On the evidence of one game, things look good. Stationed at half-back and through the midfield, the smooth-moving Irishman was all class against his former club, racking up 17 disposals. His baulk around former housemate Claye Beams and neat finish for goal in the third term was a highlight. If the Suns get the best version of Hanley, they could have one of the best recruits of the year.

Hugh McCluggage (Brisbane Lions) There’s always pressure on high draft picks walking into lowly clubs and that’s no different for McCluggage. The No.3 pick from last year’s crop started his Lions career in fine fashion. It was more the quality – rather than quantity – of disposals that caught the eye with the young Victorian. He finished with 14 touches and whether it was a deft handball out of trouble in defence in the opening half or a second effort to get the ball inside 50 later in the match, McCluggage had composure many players his senior would envy. The teenager will play a variety of roles this season, but based on Sunday’s evidence, should get plenty of opportunities. – Michael Whiting

Pearce Hanley shakes hands with former teammate Tom Rockliff. Picture: AFL Photos

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This July, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the premier of season 1, episode 1 of Mad Men, the 1960s era show that validated and united everyone who’s worked in advertising.

Ten years later, we’re still nostalgically sharing marketing insights coined by Don Draper and consoling ourselves with Roger Sterling’s account management axioms:

“My father used to say this is the greatest job in the world except for one thing: the clients.”

Ahh… the double-edged sword of clients.

Despite his mastery of persuasion, Don Draper couldn’t handle client management on his own. After losing the Hilton account, he confessed:

“I can sell ideas, but I’m not an account man.”

If even Don couldn’t hack it, what hope is there for the rest of us who are trying to manage clients and creative work sans account team? Well here’s the thing – Don may not have been an account man, but he was surrounded by some really good ones. And there’s plenty we can do with what they shared in Mad Men’s seven seasons.

So I’ve assigned myself the oh-so-difficult job of binge-watching Mad Men to collect these 5 lessons on account management. They’re good for the 21st century, too. And perfect even if you’re in a creative agency of one.

1. “Stop writing down what I ask for, and try to figure out what I want”

Application: Learn about your clients’ desires, culture and communication styles.

Remember the scene? Heinz baked beans could not be satisfied. They rejected every creative approach presented, and they were getting tired of saying no. Peggy met their specific requests, but had failed to understand their desires.

(Image source)

In your role as a copywriter, you need to get inside the heads of your target audience.

In your role as account manager, you need to get inside the head of your client.

Readers of Copy Hackers know that you can learn a lot about your target audience from review mining. This is much harder to do when you have an audience of one, and when you’ve never met that person IRL. Here are some tricks to make it a bit easier to figure out what your client wants.

Use social profiles to connect (but don’t be creepy about it)

It’s not always easy to discover your clients’ interests outside of the projects you’re working on. One way to get to know you them better is from their social media profiles.

Help desk software company Groove does this well. Groove follows its customers, taking note of interesting Tweets and mentioning them in their interactions.

If a company with over 6,000 users can stay connected to its clients with social media, it might work for you too. It also might make you feel like a stalker just thinking about it, which could be why you’re not doing it already.

Selling 1-to-many products online is a different game than nurturing 1-to-1 client relationships, where you’re more colleague than company. If you’re worried about crossing the line between light intel and full-blown creepster, ask yourself:

What would Zappos do?

Zappos retweets great customer quotes.

Zappos does not troll through its customer’s daughter’s birthday albums, liking and commenting on the photos.

Being professionally connected to your clients can give you valuable insights into how they see themselves (like discovering the reason your client never opens your reports is because she identifies as a storyteller who’s a marketing manager in title only).

Learn their preferred communication style

Find out what your clients want by figuring out their personality and communication style.

There’s no shortage of profiling systems. I like any framework that can be useful without needing to administer an actual test. The DiSC framework is helpful since it can be focused on workplace behavior.

You can assess your client just with a squint test, and use your findings to inform your interactions. How you’d craft an effective client email, for example, would depend on their DiSC profile:

Dominance (D-style): Keep the email brief and use a subject line that gets to the point.

Influence (i-style): Use energetic language. Exclamation marks and emoticons are usually appropriate.

Steadiness (S-style): Use polite, courteous language and make them feel needed.

Conscientiousness (C-style): Write a straightforward email that includes details, objectives and expectations.

If you want more profiling nerdiness, Crystal is an app that estimates DiSC-style personality insights based on social media and other data. Here’s a screenshot of Crystal telling me to chill out in my communications with a client:

There’s a lot your clients value that they won’t tell you directly.  Profiling can help you anticipate needs and adjust your approach.

Learn the company culture & stages of change

To help your client grow, you need to start where they are. What does the company believe about itself and its customers? What are your client’s core values and mission?

If you don’t know how to answer this, you can usually find it on LinkedIn or the current version of their website. As self-delusional or inaccurate as this material may be, there’s a reason it had sign-off and is live today.

As an account manager, you’ll need to work with, not against, your client’s existing beliefs and values. You should also know why your clients chose you as a partner. Was it:

Fit. Your voice and approach are a perfect match for your client.

Aspiration. Your client sees your work or process and thinks “we need that here.”

Change agent. Your direct contact likes your style, and wants you to help change an organization that doesn’t yet agree there’s a problem.

Hired muscle. You’re there to get work done, not challenge the status quo.

Change is not easy. It happens in stages, over time. Knowing what your client believes and what your role is will help you determine how much effort is necessary to “nudge” your client towards new beliefs and worldviews.

Unless you’re a perfect fit for your client, you’re likely to meet resistance as your client begins to consider and take steps toward the next stage of change.

Whether you’re involved in a rebrand, a push for testing, a change in positioning or any other challenge to their identity or culture, understanding the stages of change will help to know how to best manage the relationship.

2. Your work doesn’t speak for you

Application: Show your client the process and benefits of your work.

Remember the scene? Don Draper is man of mystery. Never one to talk about his past, he demurred in an important interview, resulting in an underwhelming article and a lost opportunity for publicity. Don defended his approach, saying “my work speaks for me.” Bert Cooper shot back “turning creative success into business is your work. And you’ve failed.”

(This image is from the end of the episode, where Don does a 180 and owns the interview. Watch the clip here.)

As creatives, we want our work to stand on its own, no explanation needed.

So there’s a certain kind of punch-in-the gut disappointment that comes when you’ve sent your client your best, most compelling creative work, and the email you get back says:

This is not what I expected. Can you explain your process here?

Luckily, the discipline of conversion copywriting has armed you with a deep knowledge of persuasion that can be applied to client management and business success.

Reverse the Curse of Knowledge

We’re trapped by the curse of knowledge, meaning that once we know something, we forget what it’s like to not know it. We forget that most of our clients don’t specialize in our field and don’t intuitively understand the benefits of the work we provided.

Features and benefits for the win

At some point in your copywriting career, you’ve probably lectured patiently educated another person about the difference between features and benefits.

Features are what the product does

Benefits are what the features solve

Good copy is benefits-focused. So are good client presentations and deliverables.

Think of features as your deliverables and their components: Sales pages, emails, cross-heads, fascinators, tone, social proof, etc.

Benefits are how the features will help your clients get the outcome they want. What’s the benefit of running this email? How will using testimonials improve conversion rates?

Until you have sign-off (and sometimes even after that), you’re still “selling” your ideas to a client who doesn’t know how your work will solve his problem. As in the comic below, paint a picture of the result for clients, don’t just hand them a can of (powerful, high-converting) spinach.

(Image source)

You don’t need to unpack every choice or quantify its expected lift, but providing some high-level prompts of “so you can…” or “this helps to…” can give your client the context she needs to understand and agree with your strategy.

The “because” technique

Giving people a reason — any reason — to say yes is usually better than no reason at all. A 1978 study showed that people were just as likely (93% vs 94%) to let others cut in line for a copier if they had a placebic, obvious reason (“because I need to make some copies”) as they were for a real reason (“because I’m in a rush”).

Creating a habit of offering a reason, even if it seems self-evident (“because the research shows this is what your customers want”), can help combat the curse of knowledge and get client buy-in.

Cheat your way to more transparency

Everyone wants to buy from companies that are transparent, and many people insist they’ll pay more for transparency. Whether or not that’s true, being transparent and being perceived as transparent can involve different values and skillsets.

I feel I’m being transparent if I have nothing to hide; I’m honest and meet my deadlines.

But my client doesn’t feel I’m transparent. The project is due next week and she doesn’t know if I’m 20% done or 90% done. She doesn’t know anything about my process. She’s needlessly anxious and frustrated by all the unknowns.

Harvard marketing professor Michael Norton says that to be transparent, we should have a strategy in place to show our work. He uses Domino’s Pizza Tracker as a case study for how businesses can be more transparent.

The pizza tracker is a wildly successful web app that shows the steps of preparing a pizza. But it doesn’t actually reveal new information: we already know the steps and sequence for pizza delivery.

So what makes the tracker such a huge hit? This is Norton’s explanation of why people love it (you can watch the 3 minute clip here):

“There’s something very psychologically compelling about…being able to see that it’s happening.  We really like to feel that there’s a person, scrambling around doing stuff for us, because it means we’re really important.

The more we can see into the process…the more we feel really good about the output of that process.”

Even if it’s human nature, having a client who delights in my scrambling to finish tasks for him is at odds with my ideal workflow. I’d rather go the Domino’s route of providing that feeling of transparency, without actually checking in every hour, being micromanaged, or resorting to passive-aggressive communication until one of us fires the other.

The pizza tracker’s success can be explained by the labor illusion: people are happier if they feel like we’re working harder for them – whether or not it’s true, and whether or not it improves the outcome.

Here are some ways to show your client all your hard work:

Use a collaboration tool. With a shared collaboration app (like Slack, Trello or Basecamp), the work you do stays top-of-mind, rather than lost in a crowded inbox. Let wins and milestones linger, rather than immediately archiving completed work.

Share the steps. Create distinct steps on the path between start and done, and help your clients know where you are on the journey. Document and communicate the tasks. “Phases” are good, checklists are awesome. (If you know how to use an actual progress bar for this, please share in the comments.)

Break up deadlines. This is especially useful for large projects that you’re likely to procrastinate anyway. Assign due dates to smaller steps of the process, rather than having everything due at once.

3. Don’t let your client near the check

Application: Give your clients the VIP treatment and remove the “pain of paying.”

Remember the scene? Legendary account man Roger Sterling gave Lane Pryce some sage advice as he prepared for his first client dinner. Among secrets of which drink to order and how to get the client to fill out his own RFP, he suggested: “Get your answers; be nice to the waiter; don’t let him near the check.”

(Image source)

As a copywriter in the internet age, you’re probably not closing clients over steak dinners or renewing contracts from courtside seats. I’ll be forever grateful that I can keep clients without having to play golf.

But there’s a hidden cost to this low-cost way of business: losing the chance to grab the check. There are some real advantages to giving clients the VIP treatment. Here’s how to be the hero without buying the next round.

How to “get the check” with strategic gifting

Smart account managers wine & dine and otherwise lavish attention on their clients to leverage the rule of reciprocity, which is that people are likely to return the favor and give back (in the form of loyalty, repeat business, referrals, etc).

John Ruhlin, author of Giftology: The Art and Science of Using Gifts to Cut Through the Noise, Increase Referrals, and Strengthen Retention, says that most businesses miss out on the powerful rewards of gifting for a simple reason: we aren’t focused on it. We’re too busy running the day-to-day.

Here are some of John’s spot-on suggestions for how to gift strategically:

Make a plan for gifting. Keep a grateful mindset, and reinvest in the people who helped you get where you are.

Give inspirational, “just because” gifts that provide real value. Gifts that are merely transactional (thanks for the referral) can feel tit for tat and have less impact.

Get the most bang for your gifting buck by avoiding “crowded” times (Nov – December) or expected occasions.

There’s a difference between a gift and a promotional item. If it has your brand on it, it’s a marketing tool. Real gifts are engraved with the recipient’s name, not yours.

You can “validate and fascinate” your clients by paying attention to what’s going on in their lives. Here’s an example of ConvertKit getting it right:

(Facebook screenshot, used with permission)

Show appreciation for the people who help your projects get done

Not only can gifting deepen client relationships, it can also help establish a better working environment. Here’s one more example of the power of gifting, for good measure…

My friend Becca works full-time on a sheep dairy farm, and she freelances as a data analyst. Her screen time is quite limited due to her massive chore schedule. She needs to get all the data in the right format on the first try to stay productive during her office hours. That almost never happens.

The reason Becca isn’t answering her email.

One of Becca’s district contacts is especially responsive and accurate with data pulls, so Becca sent a nice box of chocolates to express her gratitude. Her contact feels appreciated in a thankless data job and keeps prioritizing Becca’s work. Becca’s attempt at work-life balance is much easier.

Don’t charge your clients for each bite of pizza

If you want to keep your clients happy paying your fees, consider their psychological triggers around pricing. Your clients, like their customers, overvalue free. Dan Ariely explains:

FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is.

Create bonuses, value-adds and (reasonable) all-inclusive services. Keep these extras top-of-mind in your deliverables and invoicing. Help your client maximize perceived wins and minimize perceived losses when it comes to their budgets.

Ariely also points out that people go to absurd lengths to avoid the pain of paying.

In one study, a pay-per-bite fee structure turned a nice Italian meal into an evening of agony for his students.

(Image source)

Here are some suggestions for how to make the pain of paying less intense for your clients, modified from Dianna Booher’s  What More Can I Say?:

Bundle items to increase perceived value, and reduce the number of small purchases your client needs to make.

Offer different payment options and terms, including payment plans.

Don’t make your client feel nickel-and-dimed by adding small fees after the primary sale. (The more you think through the full scope of similar projects, the easier this gets.)

You can also minimize or restructure unsexy business costs. Let clients see certain fees are waived or included for them.

4. Half the time in this business, it comes down to, “I don’t like that guy”

Application: People aren’t just motivated by outcomes. Be Likable.

Remember the scene? Sales were flat for Admiral Televisions, and arch-rival-to-the-entire-Creative-Department Pete Campbell had an innovative solution. By advertising to a high-value, untapped demographic, Admiral could reach a warm market and secure affordable media space. Unfortunately, his racist clients didn’t care for the opportunity, or him.

After the meeting, Pete protests, “It seems illogical to me that they would reject an opportunity to make more money.”

(Image source)

Roger was not sympathetic. “I don’t know if anyone ever told you,” he said, “half of this business comes down to ‘I don’t like that guy.’” (Watch the clip here.)

People like you less if you don’t care about them

Researcher Wendy Levinson observed that there are 2 kinds of physicians: those who get sued and those who don’t. Quality of care being equal, the surgeons who were never sued had this in common: They spent longer with their patients, were more likely to participate in active listening, were more likely to explain their process and laughed easier.

Doctors with good bedside manner are more liked by their patients – who knew?

But “be friendly and likable” can be intimidating (if obvious) advice, especially for those of us who don’t identify as popular or extraverted or someone whose heart doesn’t start beating faster when the phone makes that “ringing sound.”

Keeping that study in mind, let’s flip the learnings and look at what the sued doctors have in common:

They were rushed and didn’t spend much time with their patients.

They didn’t actively listen or validate.

They didn’t explain what they were doing.

They didn’t find ways to connect and laugh with their patients.

These frequently sued doctors assumed their role as an authority excused them from being caring and empathetic. It didn’t. It never does.

Your clients are no different from these patients. Outcomes matter, but we’d all rather have great outcomes delivered by someone who isn’t cold or hostile. Especially when we’re scared or confused or our narrative is being threatened, we want to be treated with care and dignity.

The bar for being likable is not that high – you don’t need to win a congeniality contest, you just gotta treat your clients like people, and treat people like they matter.

Your client is driven by her dreams and fears, not “data”

Conversion copywriting is an increasingly measurable field. Especially when it comes to testing, we talk a lot about removing our own ego to “let the data decide.” The paradox is this:

Our clients are not data-driven. They are emotion-driven.

Your client wants to stop the test early because he doesn’t want to waste more money on a losing test (loss aversion), even though statistical significance hasn’t been reached.

She crafts self-soothing, unlikely theories about why her favorite variation lost (it kept the wrong kinds of people from buying) because of ego involvement.

When he agrees to the winning treatment, it’s not because he’s a cylon programmed to value wins over losses – it’s because he’s a human who likes to win.

You already know that people buy with emotion and justify with logic. But how do you win your clients over emotionally in a data-driven industry? Persuasion expert Blair Warren says:

People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies.

Think for a minute about difficult clients you’ve had and how you’ve responded to them.

Did you “set expectations” for their million-dollar ideas, rather than praising their ambition?

Did you let them know they weren’t seeing better results because their strategy, funnel, page or product was weak?

When they looked to you for projected outcomes, did you remind them there are no guarantees?

Did you set them straight that what they suspect is the problem isn’t actually the problem?

Did you suggest that their preoccupation with their competition is misplaced?

Confession: I’ve done all those things. This is not easy stuff to put in practice. But I’ve learned that when I react to a client as if the situation is “me vs you,” even if what I’m saying is 100% correct, they don’t care. When I reframe as “us vs them,” I can provide the same information, and I usually manage to get buy-in.

5. If you don’t like what they’re saying, change the conversation

Application:  Reframe the conversation to keep your client focused on what matters.

Remember the scene? Is change good or bad? You can’t win taking sides on that question. So when Don was asked to fight bad publicity about Madison Square Garden, he didn’t try to convince Manhattan they were wrong.

“If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.”

(Image source)

Don reframed Penn Station’s stalemate debate about the merits of change into an inspiring promise of rebirth for a decaying city. Was SCDP really fired by its biggest client (Lucky Strike cigarettes)? No, his agency is just committed to health and could no longer promote tobacco.

Everyone with clients should learn the art of reframing, or we’ll find we “don’t like what’s being said” far too often.

The surprising reason we give so much attention to things that don’t matter

In subjective fields like design and copywriting, strategy meetings often devolve into discussions about button size, word choice and colors. Parkinson’s Law of Triviality explains this phenomenon:

The less important a subject is, the more time people will spend discussing it.

This principle (also known as the bike shedding effect) is not as cynical as it may sound.

People (not just clients, this includes you and me) are 1) more likely to have opinions about subjects we understand, and 2) less likely to weigh-in about a subject we’ve never heard of or can’t relate to.

I have nothing to say about the critical debugging problem the programmers are grappling with, but I have some strong opinions about why the graphic above is not attractive enough to be used in this article.

Your clients want to feel like their ideas are important. Owning and reframing the conversation lets you leverage their interest in contributing, without treating them like the Creative Director or Editor-in-Chief. (Really, what do we expect if we’re emailing documents and asking for feedback and edits?)

How one designer convinces his clients that “shop talk” is uncivilized

Here’s how Pentagram principal designer Michael Bierut reframes the conversation with his clients. He says:

“I do anything to avoid talking about typefaces, white space, composition, or colors. When the subject comes up, I act as if that’s something civilized people shouldn’t be discussing during business hours…

If you do it right, the conversation you have with the client is 99% about their business and their goals, 1% about these esoteric tools we have at our disposal to help them achieve those goals.”

Bierut frets about typefaces for “hours on end.”

But not in front of clients.

Keep clients focused on their goals, not their opinions

Give clients a framework and criteria to evaluate the project. Paul Boag recommends giving your client a specific role based in their expertise:

Focus on the user: Keep the client thinking about what the user needs.

Focus on the business: It’s the client’s job to ensure any design meets business objectives.

Focus on the problem: The client’s job is to identify problems. It’s your job to suggest solutions.

Over on the Copywriter Club podcast, Joanna Wiebe shared some ideas for reviewing copy. She suggests sending the copy an hour before the review. In the review, don’t jump into showing them the copy. Instead, lead clients through the process you followed to arrive at that copy, like so:

These are the goals. This is what you wanted us to work toward. Here’s what we learned… As a reminder, here’s the process that we go through to arrive at this copy that I’m about to present to you today. Here are some interesting findings and now here is the copy and let me walk you through it.

Framing the conversation around goals and processes helps clients understand how to meaningfully contribute and can keep the Law of Triviality at bay.

When all else fails…

For those times when a client refuses to let go of her need to “make a mark” on the project…

Offer functionally useless choices. If your client must touch the project creatively, you can let her make functionally useless choices. Just like you’d encourage a toddler to choose between the blue shirt and the yellow shirt, give your clients options that won’t affect the outcome of the project (hair color of the avatar, name of the test or treatment, etc).

Thank you, Buzzfeed, for making us feel like our random choices matter.

Try the duck technique (use with caution!): Some frustrated creatives resort to the duck technique, where they intentionally add a decoy to their work to give clients something to correct. This can backfire if the client likes the decoy, or if the decoy makes you look incompetent for not having corrected it yourself. Be sure to only use decoys that won’t harm your credibility if they’re approved.

Your 5 Take-Aways for Client Management

Lesson 1: Find ways to meaningfully connect and communicate with clients. Learn what drives them to say yes, and how to help them make changes.

Lesson 2: Overcome the curse of knowledge by showing your clients the benefit of your work. Keep them happy by showing the steps of your work.

Lesson 3: Use strategic gifting and help clients avoid the “pain of paying.”

Lesson 4: Clients are not data-driven. Apply Blair Warren’s one-sentence persuasion plan to keep them happy and on your side.

Lesson 5: Keep clients focused on goals, not opinions. Give them a framework to use to review the project.

To help you remember even more of Mad Men’s lessons for account management, check out this handy infographic:

I’ve used the titles account executive (AE), account manager and client manager interchangeably, as if they’re the same role. They aren’t. But if you’re wearing all the hats anyway, there’s not a meaningful difference.

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